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American Solar Challenge Racers Head For Canada
coondoggie writes "Solar race cars this week began their nine-day,
2,400 mile chase from Dallas to Calgary, Alberta using only the sun for fuel. The 24 teams in the American Solar Challenge race are mainly US college teams including entries from MIT, Ohio State and Northwestern. The University of Michigan's Continuum car is the defending champ, having won the Challenge in Australia last year. The University of Michigan has won four out of the eight North American Solar Challenges it has entered with its team of more than 100 engineering students, who have vowed to defend their title this year."
Yeesh. Everyone's racing in the same direction, silly wabbit. Besides, it's summer here now, so there's lots of sunlight to be had.
A local (Winnipeg) community college is participating too, here's their race blog: http://raycer.wordpress.com/
I think this kind of competition is just great, what with the innovation which is always spawned by things of this nature.
However, I can't help but notice that although I feel pride for the competitors and feel happy that progress in this direction is taking place, the public interest seems lacking. And I don't just mean Joe Shmoe is unamused: at the time of this posting the article has been front page slashdot for 5 minutes with 1 comment.
Is it because these vehicles, while being great proofs of concept, do point out the current weakness of real-time solar power? Are the cars just too lightly built and cheesy looking?
Perhaps a way to capture more popular attention (and thus imagination) might be to have a Solar "Charged" race. This would catch more interest I think.
Stipulate that the vehicles must charge their batteries using solar power and utilize only the power they have derived from the sun. This would allow high-performance electric cars to be showcased doing their sports-car killing speed runs whilst whining by like a flying saucer.
If there is one thing the scientists and geeks need to evolve, it's a better sense of PR.
If you need evidence that the nerdy are bad with PR just look at some of the scary, weird names used for our creations:
* Linux - sounds like an evil species of aliens - 'run! the Linux are attacking!'
* The Gimp - do I need to say more?
* Ubuntu - beautiful in translation, terrible as a mnemonic for the target 'lay' audience - 'ooo-but what?'
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Um, that's why the race is *2400 Miles* long. You don't win due to a random 30 second event. By your logic they should set up a dynamometer and a giant light bulb...
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IANAStatiscian
You could say the race is affected by a number of dice rolls which can either harm or benefit each car. The longer the race, the more rolls and the steeper the bell curve (actually, binomial distribution), thus getting any significant benefit or harm becomes less likely
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Ugh...out of the 3 submissions regarding the NASC, the least-accurate and least-timely one is the one that gets promoted to the front page. Sasha Zbrozek, the team lead for Stanford's next solar car, submitted a much better write-up a few days ago when the NASC started.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
So then the team is the one who is best prepared for these changing conditions. Seems kind of fair to me. Having a longer race will expose the teams to greater variety in conditions, and this can only be a good thing. You're not going to have static, ideal conditions in the real world - and presumably, these cars/this race is being held to promote and advance tech that could make it to the consumers.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?