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Aussie Team Smashes Land Speed Record For Solar-Powered Cars

Posted by Soulskill on from the with-authority dept.

snowdon writes "A record which has stood since 1987, set by General Motors, has been broken (YouTube video) by a university team. The land speed record for a solar powered car was 78km/h, and now stands at 88km/h despite the cloudy conditions... If only Doc Brown had used the metric system!"

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Cheating by using the Australian sun.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    which everyone who visits here assures me is so much brighter than their part of the world.

  2. Re:WTF!!! km/h??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Welcome to Planet Earth, where everyone uses the metric system - except for Americans.

  3. Re:Seriously? by FrootLoops · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The sun only produces so much energy per unit area on earth. As I understand it, this vehicle uses solar power directly (without storage). Really, you could probably only hope for another order of magnitude or so before reaching the theoretical limit of perfectly efficient solar energy to kinetic energy transfer, and that upper limit is generous.

    My point is solar power usage in situations like this has a definite upper limit of efficiency, which we're not *that* far away from.