Here’s your chance to impress the car industry’s top engineers

The Daimler Student Innovation Competition is looking for 30 young engineers to predict what the brakes of the future will look like and travel to Germany to explain their ideas to an audience of hundreds of the industry’s leading figures from around the world.

Finalists who make it to EuroBrake, which claims to be the world’s largest braking conference and exhibition, will also attend a Q&A session with high-level industry executives and receive a private tour of the host city Dresden, with €300 (£225) each to cover travel expenses. A panel of judges will pick three overall winners to win a further €500 (£375) each.

‘The prestige of being one of the 30 winners, that’s a CV exclusive,’ said Chris Mason, head of the organisation behind the conference and the competition, FISITA (the International Federation of Automotive Engineering Societies).

‘[The finalists] get to demonstrate their vision and talent in front of an audience of several hundred executives from the automotive sector… Who knows where your career will lead you when you get an opportunity like that?’

The challenge of redesigning brakes was chosen because of their links to several key elements of engineering that are changing the car industry: environmentally friendly design, lightweighting and alternative power-source technology in the form of regenerative braking.

But competition entries could cover brakes for anything from autonomous cars to high-speed trains to wind turbines.

‘We’re looking for them to be creative,’ said Mason. ‘I don’t know what brakes will look like but braking systems have an integral part to play in how the future automobile works.

‘I encourage them to creative and imagination but also realistic. Don’t push yourself to something that senior executives will think is beyond the realms of achievable solution. But even if there’s a germ of something in there that these guys can pick up and run with that would be fantastic.’

The Daimler Student Innovation Competition 2015 is open now and the deadline for applications is Tuesday 31st March. Eurobrake takes place on 4-6 May 2015. For more information about the competition, click here.

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