With the release of the Technical Vehicle System Documentation (TVSD), a new approach to Design Judging documentation is introduced.
Over the past years, the main technical documentation used for Design Judging has been based on the Engineering Design Report (EDR) and the Design Specification Sheet (DSS). While both formats supported the evaluation process, they increasingly led to duplicated content and limited visibility of engineering reasoning. At the same time, the content provided by teams often became repetitive across seasons, and judges had to extract relevant information from varying styles and information depth of written design reports.
The TVSD replaces this setup with a single, structured documentation format. The new format combines quantitative data with engineering explanations in a consistent, system-oriented structure. All relevant judging categories are covered, allowing teams to present their engineering work coherently and enabling judges to efficiently access and evaluate the information prior to the judging sessions. To ensure continued relevance, selected content and questions can be adapted from season to season, reflecting technological developments while keeping the core structure stable. In addition to the main content, the TVSD includes a dedicated attachments chapter. This allows teams to include visualizations, figures, and supporting material to strengthen their technical arguments.
The TVSD is designed as a standardized format applicable to both Electric Vehicles and Combustion Vehicles. While specific technical sections can be adapted to the respective vehicle concept, the overall structure remains consistent. All information is entered through the FSG webpage-based tool and lets teams generate competition-specific PDF versions based on the same dataset. Teams can create exports tailored to competitions that use the FSG database, allowing the same technical content to be reused while meeting individual submission requirements.
In summary, the TVSD is a structured and scalable system for engineering design communication, improving transparency, comparability, and the overall quality of documentation for teams, judges, and competition.