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Tokai University Team Wins World Solar Challenge
Mike_EE_U_of_I writes "My wife and I went to Australia for the World Solar Challenge. My wife put up video of the start, and now an interview with one of the drivers of the winning team. Congratulations Tokai University!"
They took 32 hours and 45 minutes to drive their car, Tokai Challenger2, 3021 kilometres on solar power averaging a speed of 91.54 kilometres per hour.
Team Nuon from the Netherlands was close behind:
Team Nuon arrived in Angle Vale at 2.12 pm Darwin time in a time of 33.5 hours with an average speed of 88.62 kilometres per hour.
Sourced from this pdf
I also congratulate the Dutch team from Delft university.
pretty amazing catch-up they did.
I live in the Northern Australia parts and if there's one thing we certainly don't have a shortage of, it's damned hot weather with a lot of sunshine, so solar really is easy for us to use/access, wish more of us were doing so.
Almost 100km/hr is quite a decent rate, note that it's the speed-limit for most of the roads in Australia (some places allow 110km/hr, Northern Territory has some "unlimited" zones but that's a bit of a misnomer).
Now, I wonder if they'll start adding new demands on the cars such as "Must run air-conditioning" or similar loads.
BTW, we'll be interviewing members of the second and third place teams tomorrow (Nuon and University of Michigan). Any questions you want my wife to ask, just post them here. I'll take a look here before we go out (in about nine hours, the clock is ticking!).
It's a bit like some cars had a race and one of them won.
Your wife asked one about what the solar were built from but the Panasonic dude didn't appear to understand. They need to understand their own products!
Yuushou, omedetou gozaimasu!
As this is a long race, and the cars are obviously optimized to be as light and aerodynamic as possible, are the drivers always listening to their teammates over radio or do they get to kick it to some tunes? Seems like driver's choice of music may help them in the endurance race. (Follow up: if any of them listen to music, what genre, specifically what tempo?)
Wow, you really can use that to begin many sentences!
How hot is it inside the tiny "cabins" of the cars? Do they have ventilation? Like another poster mentioned, they obviously don't have air conditioning.
That's the worst interview and the worst web site I've seen in quite some time. Hard to believe they took something that interesting and made it completely uninteresting.
If so, how many "puttonyos"?
Hi, I'm a previous solar car driver for a university in the U.S.. Although I never raced in WSC, I did race in ASC (American Solar Challenge) and they have similar rules.
The amount of time you get to charge the batteries is severely limited. In ASC each team is allowed to charge for one hour before they start driving and one hour after they stop. I'm not sure how much time, if any, teams are allowed to charge outside the normal driving time.
One of the main challenges in racing a solar car is finding a good balance between speed, power consumption and reliability. Obviously, the faster you go, the faster you finish the race, but that's assuming you have enough power to finish. Power doesn't just mean what's coming from your array - you have to take into consideration losses due to electronics, aerodynamics of your shell, and road resistance. Finally if your car breaks down halfway through the race, you're going to be hurting until you can get it up and running again. It's been my experience that reliability makes the largest difference - you can be going much slower than other teams, but if you're on the road the entire time and not having to pull over to fix your car, you'll be in pretty good shape.
It's my understanding that Tokai had a combination of all three - they had the speed they needed, the power to continue at that speed, and very few, if any, unplanned stops.
And they also had some luck with the weather. It was the 21Connect from the University of Twente (from which I graduated) who started in pole position. They only by a small margin won from the Nuon, the other Dutch team. On the first day, they suffered a small malfunction and lost 20 minutes. They took over many other cars, but got much further behind, because the weather conditions became worse compared to those on the top. And the conditions only became worse. Just today, the had to battle against strong winds (up to 70 Km/h) and thick clouds. Although they are on fifth position, they are not sure whether they can finish tomorrow, while Nuon team finished second behind the Tokai university team. Those differences in finishing times cannot be explained by differences in performance, but must be contributed to differences in weather conditions.