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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.
The car in TFA didn't have a battery. The solar panels are connected directly to the drive train/motor(s).
There's quite a bit of truth to what they are telling you. As MichaelSmith alluded to, it's mostly because of the lack of airborne moisture, particulates and pollution cf. the comparatively wetter, more land-covered, more populated northern hemisphere.
In fact as an Australian that went overseas to the US and Europe for the first time as a 20 year old, it's one of the first things I noticed when I stepped off the plane. The sky is often a light, hazy blue, close to ~white~ near the horizon, even on a cloudless day. Put simply, it's the greater humidity in your atmosphere (with some contribution from both man-made pollution, and natural particulates such as pollen etc). OTOH as soon as you are >50km away from the coast in Australia, a sunny sky will be a deep, deep blue, with no discernable difference in colour between 'straight up' and 'at the horizon'. Not to say you can't get days like that elsewhere (desert regions would be like this world-wide), but this is the norm over most of Australia. Where I live (which is in the inland of Australia), I have never seen that 'white haze' that is common in the northern hemisphere sky.
Of course that viciously blue sky, although nice for solar power and photography, is a curse in many ways. Low average humidity makes us the driest inhabited continent, and we also have the highest UV irradiation on earth (and the highest rates of skin cancer as a consequence). The UV index used worldwide was obviously developed in the northern hemisphere since the highest category 'Extreme' starts at 11+ (and is supposed to represent the 'top few days' in a year). The scale is kinda useless in Australia since EVERY day is 'Extreme' (our normal summertime UV here is typically in the 13 to 15 range, and I've seen higher): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index