Cost Report and Motec

[BeaverGuy]

When I was watching Washington's promo video I noticed that they have a Motec ADL dash. How many othet teams have them and how do you manage to keep cost under $25,000, when the unit costs $4,700?

[BeaverGuy]

When I was watching Washington's promo video I noticed that they have a Motec ADL dash. How many othet teams have them and how do you manage to keep cost under $25,000, when the unit costs $4,700?

[Insomniac]

I've wondered that myself, I know our motec put a massive dent in our budget and I'm dreading having to put it in our cost report. I'd hate to be one of the teams that has an M800 .... or is there something I don't know (like where to get stickers that make it look like a cheap as chips chip)

[Matt Ahl]

Simple, we don't run the ADL dash at comp. We only use it for data acquisition during testing.

[BeaverGuy]

I figured that not running during comp was about the only way to do it. But I thought there might be a couple other ways to cut cost on different parts of the car, if you did run it.

[Charlie]

How expensive is your car? We only hit 16k, we could easily fit the MoTeC ADL and stay under 25k. I saw a few ADLs at competition the last few years.

-Charlie Ping
Auburn University FSAE (http://eng.auburn.edu/organizations/SAE/AUFSAE)
5th Overall Detroit 2003
? Overall Aussie 2003. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[PSU Racing]

You just need to be creative about your cost report.

I know of one team that had an ADL and said ther vehicle only cost around $13,000.

Here is one to think about.

Did the cost judges actually point to something on your car and ask you to show it in the cost report??

They used to. But not last year. Why is that?

Garth Frederick
2004 Project Engineer
PSU Racing

1996-2002 Georgia Tech Motorsports Alumni

[Charlie]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PSU Racing:
Did the cost judges actually point to something on your car and ask you to show it in the cost report??

They used to. But not last year. Why is that?

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That really ticked me off this year. I spent so many hours makign sure everything on the car I could think of was in the report. Then the judge tells us we don't even have to take the body panels off. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_mad.gif All they cared about was if the listed items were priced correctly. Whether or not they were actually on the car was not of consequence apparently. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_confused.gif Next year we have a 1 cylinder with carbs, a solid axle, and Pep Boys tires.

-Charlie Ping
Auburn University FSAE (http://eng.auburn.edu/organizations/SAE/AUFSAE)
5th Overall Detroit 2003
? Overall Aussie 2003. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Sam Zimmerman]

I agree, Charlie. We were very careful on our cost report last year and found out that it was wasted effort as far as points goes. We later had a team tell us that they essentially submitted a lower total vehicle cost than the carbon fiber was worth alone.

Of course, the cost report wasn't the only place where things seemed a bit hokey. Did you here some of those vehicles during the autocross? I suspect one or two mufflers accidentally lost their packing. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Sam Zimmerman
Vandals Racing (http://www.uidaho.edu/~racing)

[formula_geek]

Yeah, about that muffler packing...

We did end up shooting a baffle out of our muffler during our first autocross run. After which we were promptly escorted to the sound test and our first run was thrown out. 15 minutes later, wearing our backup muffler with the exit pointed just the right direction, we were back on course.

Travis Slagle
Kettering University FSAE

[Big Bird]

For the teams coming to Oz, they still pick out bits and get you to explain their cost. Or at least they did last year. Wish they didn't. Our team got $12,000 worh of penalties from dodgy CNC'ed stuff. Ouch!

Cheers,

Geoff Pearson
RMIT FSAE 2003

Design it. Build it. Break it.

[Matt Gignac]

We itemized everything religiously, and we seemed to have gotten screwed. For example, the Palm Pilot in our dash display (a real old school one, one of the first) costed us 30$ and that was a regular price off of amazon.com (we had the webpage printed out in our cost report to prove it). The judges said it costed at least 100$. Hmmm

[D Mack - CMT]

hmm, reading this topic has me a little woried.
Hey Geoff, you had 12 grand of penalties!! can you elaborate?