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."

Comments

photos of prep day in Plano, Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some photos I shot of the teams preparing their cars the day before the rally started in Plano, Texas.

North American Solar Challenge 2008 prep day photos

Michigan didn't win the 2007 World Solar Challenge

[grimsnaggle]

Michigan did not win the 2007 World Solar Challenge. Team Nuon did so with their Nuna4.

Michigan won the 2005 American Solar Challenge race by about ten minutes over Minnesota.

My team won the 2005 American Solar Challenge for the stock class, edging out Berkeley by 26 minutes.

World Solar Challenge

[MRe_nl]

In 2001 the Nuna of the Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands, participating for the first time, was the fastest.

In 2003 the Nuna 2, the successor to the winner of 2001 won again, with an average speed of 97 km/h (60 mph).

In 2005 the Nuna team scored a hat-trick with their third victory in a row; their Nuna 3 won with a record average speed of 102.75 km/h (63.85 mph). Aurora finished in second place followed by the University of Michigan in third.

In 2007 the Dutch Nuon Solar team scored their fourth successive victory with Nuna4 in the challenge class averaging 90.07 km/h (55.97 mph) under the new rules, while the Ashiya team with their car Tiga won the race in the adventure class under the old rules with an average speed of 93.53 km/h (58.12 mph).

But it makes sense, with the average Dutch weather our solar tech has to be really good!

Breakdown of time

[BigJClark]

Time to drive from Dallas to Calgary - 2 days
Time to negotiate border crossing - 7 days

Re:Breakdown of time

[Wandering Wombat]

Not to mention confiscating your technological gadgets. You thought getting a laptop past the border was hard, let's try an entire vehicle that no-one's seen before that some young punks claim is a "magic car" that runs on sunshine and happiness.

Re:Solar power in Canada....

[Samantha Wright]

Yeah, there aren't many paths from Texas to Alberta that don't go through Quebec. I hope they make it through okay!

Why not? The sun's great up here.

[Cordath]

Calgary is one of the sunniest cities in North America in terms of amount of sunshine per year. Southern Alberta is, in large part, a semi-arid region with very low humidity, so the Sun really packs a wallop here due to very low atmospheric extinction. At this time of year the days are also longer the further North you go. Those cars will probably make better time once they cross into Canada than they will in most parts of the U.S..

However, Alberta isn't really a solar energy hot-spot. Wind power is where it's at. Alberta produces more wind power than any other province in Canada. Whichever racers have the foresight to pack a sail will probably make the best time on the last leg of their journey.