Electric Vehicle System Design Course—Implementing Synthesis-Oriented Education

The field of electric vehicles and electric mobility, like other modern engineering practice, not only requires deep analytical skills but increasingly demands the ability to synthesise and integrate knowledge across multiple disciplines (e.g., electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, sustainability engineering, design engineering) to create innovative systems. Education today, however, still has a strong analysis focus: learning, exploring, and understanding theories and concepts is the main drive. Design and synthesis build on those and aim at bringing together theories and concepts into creative and innovative systems. Teaching design and synthesis is notoriously hard. The design of electric vehicles exemplifies the complexity of contemporary engineering problems, requiring the integration of multiple domains to experience the challenges connected to design and synthesis. This paper presents the need for, rationale behind, setup of, and experiences with a 5 European Credit (140 h) Master’s-level (postgraduate) course named “Electric Vehicle System Design” that we developed as a joint effort for the University of Twente and the University of South-Eastern Norway. The course is specifically designed to immerse students in the multidisciplinary design and synthesis processes central to electric mobility. In the paper, the course framework, project-based approach, and lessons learned are discussed. This highlights how engineering students can be equipped for the challenges inherent to designing electric vehicles.