MIT’s latest solar race car might look like a funky Ikea table with a hump, but don’t laugh. It’ll do 90 mph and is packed with technology that may end up in the hybrids and EVs the rest of us will soon be driving.
“It drives beautifully,” said George Hansel, a freshman physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the team. “It’s fun to drive and quite a spectacle.”
Vehicles competing in the endurance race may look hopelessly impractical, but the competition is a test bed for batteries, motor technology and power-management systems that may eventually appear in hybrids and electric vehicles. Like Formula 1 and other big-budget motor sports, the solar challenge helps develop some of the vehicles we see in showrooms.
“It pushes the technology from the books to real life,” said Spencer Quong, senior vehicles analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It opens the industry’s eyes to how to build a more efficient vehicle.”
Like, say, the Chevrolet Volt range-extended EV, the forthcoming electric car that General Motors hopes will save its ass.
The Volt is a direct descendant of the Sunraycer solar car General Motors developed with AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft in 1987. Sunraycer smoked the rest of the grid in the inaugural World Solar Challenge, raising quite a few eyebrows back in Detroit.
Everything is packaged in a chrome-moly steel frame wrapped in carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork. The car weighs just under 500 pounds, and the top half of the body weighs just 40 pounds — with the solar cells.
“You’ve got to go 2,000 miles, you’ve got specific hours you can drive and you’ve got a fixed amount of energy in the battery,” said Spencer Quong, the Union of Concerned Scientists expert who is a member of the Team New England solar race team.
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