New Delhi,  When it was time to decide a project for their final year B. Tech (Mechanical Engineering), six students from Sanskriti University wanted to do something different.

After much of brainstorming and literature-review, they zeroed in on an electric buggy, necessarily a lightweight off-road vehicle specifically built for travelling in sandy as well as off-road terrains. A vehicle that will not just reduce pollution but the all new green vehicle buggy, designed and built by the team, is aimed at posing a strong challenge to the current generation of many off road vehicles.

The overall objective of designing and fabricating this electrical buggy is to promote the reliability and advancements of electrification in the automobile sector. The buggy has been designed to carry a load of upto 500 kgs. The biggest advantage of the buggy is that it is totally emission free and can run at a speed upto 40 kms per hour and can run upto a distance of 80 kms approximately.

The students from final year B.Tech Mech 2022 passing out batch - Thokchom, Deepak Kumar, Satish Kumar, Monu Poddar, Akhilesh Kumar Pal and Jivan Rajak - were led by Professor Anshuman Singh and other faculties and lab staff of Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University.

"The students had done EV last year. The idea for buggy was zeroed in for two reasons. One was of course, this one running on electric will be definitely better, emission free compared with the current buggies that are conventionally run on diesel or some such fuel," Singh told IANS over phone.

Second, it is also useful for racing and the students were very keen on it as the Sanskriti University takes part in the all India Universities' racing competition held by GoKart.

The future prospects of this buggy model are to integrate this model with non-conventional energy resources and make it fully automated, he said. Soon, a patent in the name of students would be applied for with the University as their sponsors. Further, the University also has an incubation centre under the Micro, Small and Medium (MSME) Enterprises sector with the Government of India, which will help take this project into commercial venture.

As it is an internal project, it is the Chancellor of Sanskriti University Sachin Gupta who funded this venture. Gupta said: "Governments worldwide are likely to promote the use of electric vehicles in the coming days as a measure to control air pollution. Recognising this, the students at our Sanskriti University dedicatedly designed an electric Buggy for travelling in sandy as well as off road terrains."