I was involved in Electrathon Canada events in 1995, 1996, and 1997. "Electrathon Canada" is a competition for student-built single-passenger electric vehicles. The goal of the competition is to go the farthest distance in an hour on a charge from a single pair of car-batteries.

1995 was the first year that the Electrathon Canada event was ever held. It was adapted from the "Electrathon America" professional-level competitions as a way for high-school students to learn about electric vehicles technology and viability, and as a way for students to learn basic design principles and gain skills in construction techniques such as welding, lathes, milling machines, bandsaw use, etc.

In 1995, as a grade 10 student taking Electronics 11, I had finished up half of my year's projects only two months into the first term, and so I was looking around for more projects to do. My electronics teacher, Mr. Wagner, suggested that I join the Engineering 11 class' extra-curricular assignment: building an Electrathon vehicle. Since it was the first time doing this project for everybody on our teams, we experienced a wide range of failures, ranging from scheduling that we never actually followed, to testing overly-complicated ideas, to having welds fail, etc. At the end of the year, after well over a hundred extra-curricular hours (and a couple sessions until beyond midnight close to the end-thanks, Mr. Wagner!), we had a vehicle. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't particularly fast (the top speed was about 27km/h, we found), but it worked, and it was reliable. Come race day, our biggest concern was competing against Vancouver Technical Secondary School, which had built a small, very lightweight aluminum vehicle. As well, we were concerned about other cars which had purchased aerodynamic fairings; we were certain that our poor aerodynamics couldn't compete. Our vehicle was built on a very tight budget, and thus we couldn't afford aerodynamic shells or fancy materials like aluminum. We were grateful to the VEVA (Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association) for having provided us with our initial set of electronics and batteries. In the competition, Van Tech dropped out of the competition relatively early-on due to their first driver having driven the motor at a greater current than it could handle, and thus having burned out the motor. In the end, largely due to the light load that our gearing ratio placed on the motor, our batteries were still quite powerful, and we ended up taking first place, much to our surprise!

In 1996 the "Engineering 11/12" course made Electrathon into a full-year in-class project. This year we were able to obtain additional funding. We built two new vehicles and raced the 1995 car again. I designed a new steel frame design for our car, and three of us spent the year building it into a functional Electrathon vehicle. Another team decided to build a very lightweight and small aluminum-frame vehicle. A third group refurbished our 1995 vehicle to race it once again. For our vehicle, it was still the same type of design as the previous year, however I specifically designed the chassis to be low to the ground, stiff, and strong. As well, to improve comfort and help keep our front axle low (and also to allow for massive welds around the kingpins) I designed an interrupted front axle, completely braced. We eliminated the jackshaft that we'd had in the 1995 design, and moved up to a stronger type of chain. In the competition, unfortunately, the 1995 vehicle performed best out of all of our three vehicles. My group's vehicle didn't have any protection around the rear wheel, and when another team rear-ended us during the competition, it destroyed our rear wheel, and unfortunately we didn't have any spare wheels. The situation was especially unfortunate for us because we were in second place at the time of the crash, and we'd carefully set our gear ratio so that the vehicle would top out at 41 km/h, and minimize power use once at that speed. The aluminum team's vehicle was having constant problems with their belt-drive system slipping, and problems with the belt coming off.

In 1997, again in the Engineering 11/12 course, we decided to enter the competition once again; much of the class chose to instead enter a different competition, aimed at designing and building efficient gas-powered vehicles. My team consisted of those of us who'd been in the competition in previous years-me, Anthony, and Martin. We decided to spend the year optimizing the 1996 vehicles, since neither one had performed to our expectations, despite being excellent designs. Mainly we spent the year addressing weak points in our designs and improving them. For my group's 1996 car, we added a cage around the rear wheel to prevent destruction of the wheel, should we be rear-ended again. I designed and built a new set of brakes, based on the "V-brakes" that Shimano was just bringing to market for mountain bikes. We designed a more-efficient fairing, and made one structural modification to the frame which had previously allowed some torsion in the frame, making it look rather strange while cornering. The aluminum car received new brakes, a new fairing, a new notched belt-drive system, designed so that it wouldn't be able to drop the belt, and it also received a few structural improvements. In the race, my team (along with volunteers from the gas teams) drove both of the 1996 cars, and we ended up taking first and third place. The aluminum car would've taken second place had the drive system been geared slightly lower; their top-speed was higher than our steel car, however their current-draw was too high, and their batteries slowed them down substantially towards the end of the competition, whereas our steel car's top speed dropped by only 4 km/h at the end of the competition.