BHUBANESWAR: Leading IT company CSM Tech has teamed up with IIT Madras to help build the world’s fastest, autonomously driven electric race car by 2025. As part of the collaboration, CSM Tech will support Raftar, a motorsports team run by the students of IIT Madras. Raftar is a team of over 40 students from different disciplines with a shared passion for automotive engineering and motorsports. Every year, the team takes up the challenge of building a swift Formula Student race car.
The synergy between the tech company and IIT-M will bring in a string of benefits like shared expertise and resources, cost sharing and risk mitigation, accelerated research and development besides standardisation, inter-operability and exchange of knowledge.
CSM’s founder and CEO Priyadarshi Pany said the Raftar team has the potential to be a game-changer in the passenger vehicle as well as heavy vehicles, telemetry, vehicle tracking and much more.
“This team is a force to reckon with and we are happy to collaborate with the institution. What the students and faculty of IIT-M can achieve with indigenously built electronics, embedded technologies, and cross-domain expertise is simply spectacular. We expect the next big innovation in the automobile industry to originate in India,” he added.
Started in 2012 as a student’s club for building a blazing-fast combustion-driven sportscar, the team has won the Formula Bharat, the topmost motorsports event in the country for educational institutions, thrice, the highest among other peers. It has also marked its footprints at events like Formula Germany and established itself as a formidable force in the university-level combustion and EV categories.
Dean of Industry Contribution and Sponsored Research at IIT-M Prof Manu Santhanam underscored the role of industry partners in enabling and empowering the engineering ecosystem at IIT, especially team Raftar. He accredited the students for the temperament and determination to lead such a complex project, executing it excellently and refusing to give up.