The SAE Aero Design competition is a real‐world design challenge designed to compress a typical aircraft development program into one calendar year, taking participants through the system engineering process of breaking down requirements. It exposes participants to the nuances of conceptual design, manufacturing, system integration/test, and sell‐off through demonstration.

This competition continues the strong partnership between GM and SAE in STEM education and will build on the ground-breaking success of the original four-year series, AutoDrive Challenge™. Our second series aims to have participating university teams develop and demonstrate an autonomous vehicle (AV) that can navigate urban driving courses as described by SAE Standard (J3016™) Level 4 automation.

In Baja SAE, engineering students are tasked with designing and building a single-seat, all-terrain sporting vehicle that is to be a prototype for a reliable, maintainable, ergonomic, and economic production vehicle that serves a recreational user market. The students must function as a team to design, engineer, build, test, promote, and compete with a vehicle within the limits of the rules.

The SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge provides participants with the opportunity to enhance their engineering design and project management skills by re-engineering an existing snowmobile to reduce emissions and noise. Participants’ modified snowmobiles compete in a variety of events, including emissions, noise, fuel economy/endurance, acceleration, handling, static display, cold start, and design.

Formula Hybrid Competition is an interdisciplinary design and engineering challenge for undergraduate and graduate university students. They must collaboratively design and build a formula-style electric or plug-in hybrid racecar and compete in a series of events. This educational competition emphasizes drivetrain innovation and fuel efficiency in a high-performance application.

The Formula SAE® series competitions challenge teams of university undergraduate and graduate students to conceive, design, fabricate, develop, and compete with small, formula-style vehicles. The competitions give teams the chance to demonstrate and prove both their creativity and engineering skills in comparison to teams from other universities around the world.

Introduced in 2013, Formula SAE® Electric allows the development of fully electric vehicles within the FSAE® framework. Teams use vehicles powered only by electrical motors and compete in static and dynamic events such as design, presentation, cost, acceleration, skidpad, autocross, endurance, and efficiency.

Our latest challenge, Mission Autono, is part of the Emerging Technology Portfolio, which expands the STEM workforce pipeline by radically investing in diverse participants as they solve new mobility challenges. The Mission Autono program enables participants to develop software seeking SAE J3016 – Level 3 status through a one-year enhanced learning opportunity.