MIT Motorsports: The Autonomous Dream

A Team That’s Family. A Shop That’s Home. Building a Car That’s Beyond Any Formula.

MIT Motorsports is a student-led racing team of over 150 students who design, manufacture, validate, and test a fully electric Formula-style racecar each year. We represent MIT at Formula SAE Electric and Formula Hybrid+Electric, two of the most competitive collegiate engineering events in the world. Last season, we placed 9th overall at Formula SAE Electric and earned 1st place in Vehicle Design at Formula Hybrid+Electric for the second consecutive year. Our racecar is almost entirely student-built, with most systems designed and manufactured by our members from concept to completion in just a few months. We spend countless late nights designing, machining, and testing, always racing against deadlines, but at the end of the day we are just a group of friends building something incredible together, a car that embodies our shared passion, creativity, and drive to push what is possible.

Where Students Become Engineers.

Our members come from all backgrounds, some join with years of experience while others start with no knowledge of cars or design, but all share a drive to learn and push their limits. Through hands-on training and mentorship, students quickly contribute to major projects such as our epicyclic gearbox, custom motor controllers, custom dynamometer, and real-time telemetry systems that stream live performance data. The work is demanding, fast-moving, and deeply collaborative, with ambitious deadlines that challenge students to think critically and engineer at a professional caliber. Here, curiosity turns into capability, and teammates become engineers in the truest sense.

The Future: MIT Motorsports’ First Autonomous Racecar.

This year we are taking our boldest leap yet with Model Year 2026, developing MIT Motorsports’ first fully autonomous, four-wheel-drive racecar. Our members are building a driverless system that combines synchronized LiDAR and camera vision, state estimation, and motion planning, all built in-house. We will compete in the inaugural Formula SAE Driverless competition, becoming one of the first U.S. teams to debut a fully operational autonomous racecar. Despite being only a two year old subteam, we are not just participating, we are aiming to win.

Your support makes this vision possible. Every contribution helps us acquire the sensors, electronics, and materials that bring autonomy to life. By supporting MIT Motorsports, you are fueling the next generation of engineers, students who refuse to accept limits and are defining the future of racing, innovation, and technology at MIT.

Suggested Donations:

• $100 — Helps fund testing trips to validate our autonomous stack, covering travel and vehicle rental expenses.
• $500 — Supports the purchase of one of our many critical autonomous sensors used for perception and data collection.
• $1,000 — Subsidizes electrical components required to integrate our autonomous systems onto the racecar.
• $2,500 — Covers approximately 425 hours of computing costs for ML training that power our perception and state estimation systems.
• $5,000 — Covers two months of data labeling, significantly reducing the burden on our development timeline and accelerating our path to a fully validated driverless car.

All donations to MIT Motorsports are tax-deductible. As a token of our gratitude, we’d love to share a few exclusive ways to thank our supporters:

• $500 — Receive an official MIT Motorsports team T-shirt, the same one our members wear to competitions.
• $1,000 — Receive a premium MIT Motorsports Lululemon jacket and have your name or logo featured on our website.
• $2,026 — Celebrate our Model Year 2026 milestone with your name or logo displayed on one of our six battery modules and on the racecar, plus the Lululemon jacket.
• $5,000 — Enjoy private driver training, an invitation to our testing days, social media features, your name or logo on the racecar and website, the Lululemon jacket, and two team T-shirts.

If you’re interested in corporate sponsorship opportunities, please email fsae-business@mit.edu and check out our sponsorship packet to learn more about partnership tiers and benefits.

Stay connected and follow our journey on Instagram (@mitmotorsports) and LinkedIn (MIT Motorsports) for updates, behind-the-scenes content, and race results.