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Aussie Team Smashes Land Speed Record For Solar-Powered Cars
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!"
that it was only making about one point twenty one kilowatts.
This seems rather low, and certainly not a record. Unless they compete in a "differently abled" class?
The Nuna 2 solar powered car that won the World Solar Challenge in 2003 had the following stats for the race:
Total race time: 31 hr 5 mins.
Average speed: 97,02 Km/h
Topspeed: 130 km/h
Top speed they had during Adante tour in 2004: 145 km/h
Link: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMCCBZO4HD_Benefits_2.html
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuna_5 for the stats of the Nuna 5.
Theoretical max speed: 175 km/h
Keep in mind that this was done by a (Dutch) university team as well.
Considering the fact that the sunswift team wants to compete in the WSC as well - I think they either need to get up to 188 km/h, or throw in the towel. Or perhaps I'm missing something but I did RTA and nothing suggests they really set a new speedrecord, except their own propaganda.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I thought the fastest was 105mph
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The article do not mention that car is only allowed to run by direct solar power.
no batteries are allowed in this competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunswift
I think the issue is more the power/drag ratio of the photovoltaic cells.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The article do not mention that car is only allowed to run by direct solar power.
They say:
We smashed the Guinness World Record for fastest Solar-Powered vehicle by over 10 kmh.
It doesn't say Battery powered or Petrol powered.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Both vehicles have about 25kG of batteries. The difference: Sunswift 4 was operating only off solar power, whereas Nuna was in a race where batteries were not only allowed, but required (the race was over several days.) Nuna had both solar and battery power for acceleration.
Please help metamoderate.
which everyone who visits here assures me is so much brighter than their part of the world.
I can tell you the World Solar Challenge rules. (The SunSwift car depicted looks like it follows WSC Challenge class rules.) There are safety requirements for roll cage, braking, steering, wiring, circuit breakers. The driver's eye-line must be at least 70cm above the road. There's a maximum angle the driver is allowed to lay back at. There's a max of 6 square meters of solar cells. The battery is a max of 5kW.h. (This is a trivial amount of energy compared to the energy budget over the whole challenge, but is tactically useful for hill climbing, clouds, etc.)
It looks like the only change they made for this Guinness challenge was to remove the battery pack.
Yes, it looks like the 2003, 2005, 2009 WSC challenge winners (Nuna, Nuna, Tokai) could have knocked this record over, just by removing the battery pack and getting Guinness certification. Doing some rough maths, UNSW's pace is still pretty competitive: the speeds you see listed for WSC course competition do not figure in the time the cars spent charging their batteries each dawn and dusk, after racing ends at 5pm for the day and before it begins at 8am the next day.
The "wing" portion of the car that has the solar panels appears to replicate the shape of an aircraft wing - why? The lifting force of the airfoil, while helpful for rolling friction, results in additional drag. Considering how negligible the rolling friction is I do not see this as being helpful. I would think that a thinner wing that cuts cleanly through the air without any resulting lift would do better. Of course the one photo of the car that I saw could have simply given me the wrong impression regarding the shape of the "wing".
Welcome to Planet Earth, where everyone uses the metric system - except for Americans.
Dude, pretty well the rest of the frigging world uses Metric. It is only the USofA that has its head in the sand wrt Imperial vs Metric.
This is wholly - as in, absolutely, completely - unimpressive. If I could be de-impressed, I would be.
It's been over 20 years since the 'original' record was set, and it's only now being broken? What the fuck have we been spending gobs of "government" money on green energy for, if this record is only now being broken?
And it's not even "the" record. It's the "electric" vehicle record! How is that even significant, when electric vehicles are trying to compete against traditional ICE vehicles? It's like being the tallest kid on the short bus.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
> If only Doc Brown had used the metric system!
You'd be 53.6km/h short.
I wonder if snowdon was on the team that sent the Climate Orbiter to Mars... it's not a 1:1 conversion dammit!
In addition to being 53.6km/h short, he'd also be approximately 1.21 jiggawatts short too. I'm not exactly sure what a jiggawatt is, but assuming it's a gigawatt or something bigger, whatever power the car does generate from the sun is an insignificant fraction of that.
At the time the movie was made, the giga prefix wasn't in popular use except in certain scientific fields, and scientists disagreed whether it should be pronounced with a hard g or a j-sound. Jiggawatt was a perfectly correct pronunciation which simply went out of fashion.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
How about something useful like: cubits per epoch, spans per generation or paces per age.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
It's not as bleak as you think. The GM record was set with 15 square meters of solar panels, and the UNSW team broke it with 6 square meters of panels. Both are using commercial grade rooftop cells that you can buy right now.
Companies the world over are trying to build better and cheaper solar panels. Many of them have received very significant government investment. Take a look at Emcore, Spectrolab, Sunpower, First Solar, Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, REC, etc etc. The list extends beyond the eye can see.
You do have a point, however. Our current patent and copyright system is an exercise in absurdity and needs to be fixed - somehow. But those systems are not a problem for the solar industry yet. The field is growing far too quickly for anyone to be worried about stalling innovation with patents.
I bet you're going to tell me that car companies have been holding out on a carburetor that could give us 300mpg cars too, huh?
It's too bad they didn't have a water powered car... it would be going like crazy.. if not for all the flooding.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
According to Wolfram Alpha it's ~~ 0.99 × speed at (or below) which Sammy Hagar cannot drive.
That was my thought. This wasn't a problem with the metric system, he'd have made it 88km/h if he could, as that's just shy of 55mph, which is a lot easier to get a vehicle up to than 88mph.
Both vehicles have 25KG battery packs. Read the spec sheet. The difference is that they didn't use the batteries in the world speed record run.
Please help metamoderate.
Nuna, Tokai, and most of the other top cars from the last decade use GaAs solar cells. The Guinness record requires the use of silicon cells.
88 km/hr is slower than the one-hour standing start record for human powered streamlined bikes (90.6 km/hr for a single rider). I suppose that's because the large surfaces needed for the solar cells add to the frontal area and drag for the electric vehicle.
To whomever tagged this 'fastestindian'. The moniker refers to Burt Munro who was a New Zealander.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Fastest_Indian
This was performed by The University of New South Wales, which is in Australia.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
The Guinness record requires the use of solar cells in general, whether they're GaAs or Si cells.
There is still land in Australia? ;-)
I love solar cars. I hope that one day they will replace present cars. That day will come,I'm sure!
I don't think the line "141.6-ish kilometers per hour!" rolls off the tongue nearly as well.