A Dream, a Student Race Car, and My Dad’s Old Hyundai Equus

I’m a third-year electrical engineering student at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, studying energy systems engineering on the electrical track. For two years I’ve been on our school’s student-built EV racing team, doing electrical systems — wiring harnesses, battery packs, CAN communication, and all the sensors nobody thanks you for until they fail.

Our team is only three years old. We’re not famous. Half of what we know, we learned by breaking something at 2 a.m. first. But we’re getting quick — this year we’re seriously aiming for a podium. Last season we spent weeks wondering why the car felt slow, until we checked the current draw and found our 300-amp motor politely sipping 30 amps because of one controller parameter. We fixed it, the car turned violent, and I grinned for a week. That feeling is why I do this.

The Dream

Here’s my dream, written down so I can’t quietly delete it later: I want to make enough money to spend weekends at a circuit doing time attack in cars I love, without checking my bank account first. And on graduation day, I want to arrive in a BMW M2. Not a rental. Mine.

The Bet

How do I get there? Probably not on a salary. A while ago I won a top prize at a startup competition, and it settled a question I’d been circling for months: I’m going to build my own thing. What changed the math for me is AI. I recently wrote and shipped working C firmware for our race car’s ESP32 telemetry system in about two weeks, with AI as a very patient pair programmer. Our team had assumed we’d need to recruit a software major for that. We didn’t. Work that used to require hiring now requires directing tools well — and I’d rather learn to direct.

I’m not romantic about it. AI output still has that AI smell sometimes, and my teammates tease me for running everything through it. But I watched the same movie happen with the internet: the people who adapted early looked silly for about five minutes, and then they didn’t. My test is simple — does it save me time or money? If yes, I’m in.

Fundamentals

The other thing I believe in is fundamentals. I learned that the embarrassing way, through football: I was a decent striker in middle school mostly because I was tall, then got thoroughly humbled later by guys who had drilled the basics. Math went the opposite direction — I spent two dull years repeating the same foundations until they set, and every course after that got easy. Same lesson from both sides: fundamentals compound, shortcuts don’t. It’s why I keep an error notebook. A mistake I’ve written down once doesn’t get to beat me twice. I’m applying the same idea to driving right now — before chasing a circuit license, I’m doing driving-experience days and grinding the unglamorous basics.

What This Blog Is

So that’s what CarVoltLab is. I’ll write about cars the way I actually work on them: tools I really use, electrical problems I’ve really diagnosed, and how the technology in your car actually works — from someone who spends nights elbow-deep in a race car’s harness. If I get something wrong, tell me. Corrections get priority here; being right matters more to me than looking right.

For the record, my daily driver is my dad’s old Hyundai Equus. I used to call it a grandpa barge. Then I noticed it’s a quietly quick rear-wheel-drive V6 that shrugs at highways, and now I defend it in arguments. The M2 can wait a few years. The dream doesn’t expire.