By Elise Ong, April 14, 2026
The Cal Poly Pomona Human Powered Vehicle club made its comeback April 10-11 competing in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers competition in Dallas.
The club took part in ASME’s e-Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, where members competed against 26 schools, according to the club’s team leads. The competition required participants to create a vehicle to be put to the test in design, endurance and drag trials.
Since the fall semester, the team has been planning and designing their vehicle that would comply with the competition regulations. Because the club had been inactive since 2018, the team had nothing from past years to pull inspiration from and built from the ground up.
For the competition, the club built a recumbent tadpole tricycle. This performance e-bike is a hybrid, using power from the legs of whoever is in the vehicle as well as an electric motor, which was only recently allowed in this competition as technology for electric bikes has become more accessible, according to the steering team lead and mechanical engineering student Princeton Nguyen.
“We’ve made extreme progress,” said mechanical engineering student and club President Russtin Esfahani. “This is definitely going to be a future investment to not only allow Cal Poly Pomona to go to more ASME competition but to establish ourselves as a lead player in those competitions.”
The club went inactive in 2018 after former leader Calvin Iba left the club, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, about seven years later, a group of friends have kick-started the club once again.
Within the club are sub teams, each responsible for a particular aspect of the vehicle, including drivetrain, steering, frames and aerodynamics. Between the 10 members on the team, four are team leads.
Esfahani said time management and delegation were challenges in their competition preparation, especially in the earlier stages. After finding their rhythm, however, they were able to execute their plans.
“These past three months we have just been nonstop streamlined,” Esfahani said. “We have been all on the same page, especially knowing that we’re actually building it, and we’re going to the competition. We all kind of locked in and were like, ‘OK, this is real now. We’re ready to hit the ground running and we’re all united.’”
The team also had several technical setbacks due to time and budgeting restraints, according to the drivetrain team lead and mechanical engineering student Pericles Martikas.
“We’ve had to change our design multiple times to account for budget,” Martikas said. “(We) can’t spend money that we don’t have. … If we had enough time, we could make this setup as complex as we want, but it’s just not realistic, and it doesn’t necessarily guarantee better performance.”
One aspect that needed adjustment was the vehicle tires, as the team was unable to use the ones they initially planned for, according to Martikas.
“I did a bunch of research on what tire to get, but at the end of the day, both for budgetary and time constraint reasons, it just didn’t make sense and I ended up opting for a different tire,” Martikas said. “There’s probably a million stories like that throughout the project where we ended up opting for different strategies to accomplish the same goal.”
After starting the year with a small team and no prior project to build off of, the team visited other schools, including University of California, Irvine and California State University, Long Beach, for inspiration and advice, according to Nguyen.
“Something that UCI told us was that they had issues where chains broke, and we weren’t aware of that,” Nguyen said. “Who would’ve thought when you’re pedaling, the chain would just break? … That’s something that we wouldn’t have ever thought could’ve happened. Now we’re prepared for that. We’re going to have an extra chain during competition.”
Despite the setbacks the team encountered, the team leads, who were all friends before taking this project on, said they feel this experience was a solid way to round out their senior year together.
Members hope the momentum they have built will continue in future years and for others to get the same hands-on experience they did.
“You get to be a part of something where an idea starts on a notepad, … and then you’re actually physically building it with your hands and testing it,” Martikas said. “I think there’s something to be said, pride you can take in the effort you put in and seeing it come out and blossom into something.”
Although the team did not place within the competition, the team’s hindsight into their journey back into existence as a working club has been an encouraging learning experience.
“I think the best way to learn is from failure,” Esfahani said. “I think there is so much we could’ve done better, but to see where we’ve gotten now is so incredibly inspiring. There was no way we could’ve gotten to where we are without messing up … Doing stuff with your friends (and) enjoying the ride is the best thing ever.”
