In early October, special vehicles prepared to race three thousand kilometers across Australia from Darwin to Adelaide. These cars all had one thing in common. They ran on sunlight. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is tech stuff daily. The race is called the World Solar Challenge. Hans Fulstrip and Larry Perkins built the foundation for the race way back in ninety two when they built and drove a solar powered car named the Quiet Achiever across Australia from the west
to the east. Five years later, Thulstrop had organized a full challenge to pit teams against one another. The challenge isn't just about going fast, It's about engineering a vehicle capable of making the most out of the energy harvested from the sun. So why create such a competition. It's not just a design challenge. According to the twenty seventeen World Solar Challenge Regulations, the purpose of the race is to quote stimulate research into and development of sustainable road
transport in the quote. This year's winning vehicle and the challenger class was the Noonah nine. A Dutch team of engineers built the Noonnah nine and held onto their winning record The same team has won three of these challenges over the last few years. The NOONNAH nine traveled at an average speed of eighty one point two kilometers per hour, which is about fifty five miles per hour. Because the vehicles depend upon solar power, they only traveled during daylight hours.
The race had seven checkpoints that the vehicles had to reach, and the race could only last from eight am to five pm each day. In total, the NOONAH nine raced for thirty seven hours, ten minutes and forty one seconds. That's four hours longer than the team's fastest time, but environmental fact there's like wind slowed down the progress this year. What does it take to raise a car using solar power as the main energy source. First, it means most of the car's upper surface is home to hundreds of
solar cells. It's the job of these cells to convert light into electricity. As you can imagine, it means making a lot of sacrifices to improve efficiency. Vehicles must be very light and precisely engineered to be as aerodynamic as possible. Factors like drag and rolling resistance can have a big effect on a car's performance. They also must be incredibly lightweight on the order of a few hundred pounds per car. The average weight of a consumer vehicle is closer to
four thousand pounds. Anything that doesn't directly contribute to operating the vehicle is superfluous and typically excluded from the car's design. Vehicles are allowed to have an onboard battery to supplement solar power. The battery charges whenever the car is receiving more solar power than is necessary to provide energy to the electric odor. Typically, car designs also allow for battery charging to happen whenever a car is traveling downhill and
gravity takes over. The challenge features tweaks to rules and regulations each time it happens. This year, that included allowing for a larger maximum vehicle size, which gave teams more options when designing their cars. However, the amount of solar collector area shrunk a bit. The maximum surface area that could host solar cells in a Challenger class race car was four square meters. That's half the size of what cars could use during the first World Solar Challenge in seven.
The reduction shows how far teams have advanced in their design since that first race. Other regulations involved how high a driver's eyes must be from the surface of the road no less than seven hundred millimeters, the number of wheels allowed per vehicle that would be four, and the mass requirement for a driver, which was eight krams. If a driver's mass was below eighty kilograms, the challenge provide canvas bags filled with steel shot to serve as ballast.
The race provides a tangible challenge for engineering teams. Groups have to take many factors into account, including terrain, weather conditions, solar panel efficiency, and vehicle design. These guide the teams as they make decisions about their vehicles, and those design choices might inform future vehicle design or solar power deployment. This doesn't mean we'll all be driving around in solar
powered jelaps in a few years, though. A secondary competition in the World Solar Challenge pits vehicles that follow a more consumer friendly design called the Cruiser Class as they race across Australia. But this could also mean we see solar panels incorporated into electric vehicles to supplement the car's power needs. It's even possible that solar powered car might serve as an electrical generator for a home, storing excess
energy in your house's battery pack. So while you're not going to jump behind the wheel of a solar racer unless you're on one of these teams, the technology developed in the pursuit of that a elusive championship could make its way into a car you drive in the future, or in your home, or in one of a hundred ways we don't even anticipate at this point. That's all for today. To learn more about solar power, race cars, and all other things tech, subscribe to the tech Stuff podcast.
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