TU/ecomotive is a student team from the Eindhoven University of Technology. Consisting of more than 25 students from more than 11 different nationalities and 12 different educational backgrounds.

The team is fully dedicated to building a concept car that aims to improve sustainability in the automotive industry. Each year we build a new car with its own completely new design and a different area of sustainability it aims to tackle. Since our founding in 2012, we have built nine cars.  The most recent cars have been a car that is made from ocean waste, a car that is fully modular and adapts to your needs, a car that is CO2 neutral, and most recently a car that is 75% closed loop recyclable. You can find all of our previous projects on our website: https://www.tuecomotive.nl/.

Phoenix - The car made to be rebuilt: 75% closed loop recyclable

After unveiling each car, we it on a tour. During this tour we reach a great audience and make a big impact by participating in trade fairs and visiting car companies. Over the last few years we have visited Ferrari, BMW, Volvo Cars, and Volvo trucks. In these visits we share our vision and exchange knowledge, so that the automotive industry can implement our ideas into consumer cars.

Our team’s long term vision is to eventually combine all of different sustainability concepts into one ultimate sustainable car. To achieve this, we have gathered knowledge on different sustainability topics each year.

Building on our great past successes, we are now building our 10th concept car, which will be all about improving the right to repair in the automotive industry. We have seen that cars are becoming harder to repair, and are becoming less and less accessible for a regular consumer. By reversing this trend and riding the wave of the right-to-repair movement, we hope that over time, anyone can fix any problem in their car fast, cheap, and easily. Below you will find a video outlining the main ideas behind the car.

In this car we will use many PCBs, sourced from three different designs: a control network PCB, a driver board for the headlights, and an ignition PCB.

By far the most interesting PCB is the control network PCB. To improve repairability we are aiming to standardize this PCB throughout the car. This would mean one kind of design for all different nodes within the control network: such as light controllers, door locks, the diagnosis network, and all the different sensors throughout the car. The main advantage of this architecture is that it won’t matter which PCB is used where, and if needed, you can repair a critical component by taking components form a non-critical one. This PCB will also feature disconnection detection of different sensors and other nodes on the network, improving the diagnosis of problems in the car, and giving specialized instructions on how to fix certain components.

With building a car, also comes a large challenge in mechanical engineering. Throughout the car we use several specialized CNC parts, such as in the suspension system, and in mounting of the body-panels. This mounting system will also be specialized to improve repairability. With this mounting system, the owner of the car can easily detach these panels, which greatly improves the accessibility of the underlying components, which improves the ease of repair.

While still in the design phases for most of these components, we do have some initial designs. If interested, we are open to sharing more of the current designs with PCBWay.

As a team, collaborating with PCBWay would mean a great ability to rapidly prototype these parts, which normally is a big challenge due to budget and time constraints. Designing and building a car from scratch in one year is not easy, and any support we can get is a massive help. We would be very excited to work with you to produce the PCBs and some CNC parts.

With PCBWay’s support we could develop and highlight the capability of anyone being able to repair any aspect of the car, even aspects that were previously out of reach for regular consumers: the PCBs and the specialized CNC parts. We hope that his project can highlight these possibilities of today’s world. In return for the support we are open to discussing some of our sponsorship packages we offer our partners such as a sticker on the car, and social media posts, which reach a wide audience of predominantly students interested in technology and engineering.

We would be very excited to partner with PCBWay to make our next car possible!

• CNC
• PCB
• Innovation
• Student team
• Sustainability
• Automotive
• Right-to-repair
• Cars