Battling extreme heat, kangaroo roadkill and a constant threat of clouds, the University of Michigan Solar Car crew shows how teamwork and technology can produce an engineering feat.
For almost five long, sizzling days, an all-star team of 17 University of Michigan students took to the Australian outback, racing a car that guzzles little more than ingenuity and sunshine. The race is the Bridgestone World Solar Car Challenge, a biennial event since 1987 where energy-efficient cars from around the world race almost 1,900 miles to push the limits of solar car innovation.
It’s the World Cup of solar car racing, and University of Michigan is a tier-one team. In 2015, the team finished 4th out of 42 teams from 20 counties.
“It is a thrill to participate in such a big race with engineers from all over the world,” said Pavan Naik, an industrial and operations engineering student at the University of Michigan. Naik is the team’s manager, handling things like budget, staffing, supplies and logistics for shipping the solar car to Australia.
His team’s car, named Aurum, finished behind teams from the Netherlands and Japan, but there was a lot to celebrate.
“We built a car that’s faster than any other University of Michigan team,” he said, and the results bodes well for the future of both solar car racing and the advancement of energy-efficient vehicle research.
“The innovations that we’re creating through building and racing solar cars are pushing the current boundaries of solar technology, but also overall vehicle efficiency,” said Naik. “The automobile of the future, I think, will look and behave very differently from what we are used to today.”
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