Students Take on the World’s Toughest Solar Car Race

A team of 27 students from Chalmers University is building a solar-powered race car to compete in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, a 3,000 km race across the Australian outback. Their goals are to finish the race and become Scandinavia’s best racing team. Watch this video to learn more!

Transcript

00:00:00 Our first goal is to finish the competition. Our second goal is to become Scandinavia's best racing team. This is so cool. I want to do this. I want to go to Australia. I want to build a solar powered car. Out of all of the things I am taking with me, this is the one that will sort of shape me the most. Spending the time with the team, you know, that's the the most fun for me. We always joke, we have a good time, but we are also productive. Of course.

00:00:28 My name is, Daniel Uphoff I'm from Germany, and I study my master's in Industrial Ecology here at Chalmers. We are a student team. Made up of, I think we are currently 27 members. And our goal is to build a solar powered race car. My name is Tilde. I study mechanical engineering. In my third year, here at Chalmers. So we build a solar powered car.

00:00:53 Completely on our own. just as students, it's a side project, so it's not part of any course. It's just that we have the passion and the drive, and we want to do it and try it. And our goal is to get, a car that we can travel with from Darwin to Adelaide. My name is Rickard Lennernäs, and I study mechatronics. It's the Bridgestone World Solar challenge. It's one of many challenges. Sort of. I like that in the world.

00:01:18 But this is the biggest one. a competition about efficiency, mainly because you only get energy from the sun. And then you have to build everything. You can buy parts But that's not the fun part. Designing, building, seeing what works and what doesn't. That is the fun part. Every year we get more new students who keep developing and trying new concepts, trying new cars. And every time we build a completely brand new car, more or less.

00:01:41 This involves the planning process. This involves the actual building of the car. basically everything we have that is not pre manufactured. All the hinges, the mechanical parts, the composites that we are doing. So the composite is like the body of the car. Everything from rims to suspension to the battery system that we were testing behind us right now, over to the low voltage electronics, to side mirrors. And you don't want mirrors so use cameras instead. Getting that to interface, the communication with the convoy

00:02:10 when you're actually running, because it's, the car is very efficient and it's very good at doing what it does, but it only does one thing and that is go forwards extremely efficiently. I work a lot with like personal logistics. How do we get people to Australia from Australia? What do we do there? I worked with the budget in the economy and getting all of that to work and make sure that we have the funding to do this project. I originally joined, as the responsible for marketing and PR. In the end, I also, helped build the car a little bit,

00:02:44 so I sometimes, went to Falkenberg where we did the composites for our car. So I also got, quite a bit of hands on engineering experience, how to work with carbon fiber, composites and, I didn't really expect that in the beginning, but I'm really glad that it happened like that. Yeah. We do get a lot of support from Chalmers and from our sponsors as well. Like there's a lot of competencies out there. We have our alumni who've done this before, who we've been able to ask. But then, I mean, most of the things that we're doing,

00:03:18 we're doing in different way, but it's not new in itself. So there's always somebody who might know something. So we are able to get a lot of that support, even if we're on our own in a sense. that's something that builds the team is that you're able to figure it out together. I think that is really cool because, basically this is also how it would be in a real life environment. Right? Let's say you have a project and you have to manage it from start

00:03:46 to finish by yourself. And I feel that I myself and also all my team members, we grew a lot, through this, whole experience. A lot of your studies, it's more theoretical. It's not very applied. But here you get to see what you're doing and you have your results, and you also tested because, I mean, at competition, it's a real proof of did we succeed with what we're doing? It's so much more exciting than doing an exam,

00:04:13 maybe where you're like, oh, yeah, this is the grade that I got here. Here get to see, oh, yeah, this is how far we travel. This is how many people we were able to get to drive it. This is you can touch it, you can feel it, and it's so much more applied. Anyone can apply in any grade, any program. That's the thing that's great about this is everyone's needed because obviously we need to build a car, but we also need the funding. We need, people to do PR, we need people who like to talk about it and to encourage other people to do it.

00:04:45 But one also needs to realize that this is a time investment and it's it's going to be tough. It's gonna take time. This is a year where you will be doing mainly this and that is required of you. It's probably at the same time the most rewarding thing you can do for the same reasons. But it is a demanding environment. If you're up for this thing, go for it. And you probably don't know if you're up for it before you actually give it a go.

00:05:14 Like, every time I meet new people and so on, I always talk about the Solar team. And it's just, great, great experience. And, Yeah, I I'm so hyped for it. It's probably going to be one of the highlights of my life, I'm not gonna lie. Of course, the worry is that the car maybe doesn't make it, but, I mean, we are high on confidence. Our spirits are high, so, I'm pretty sure it's going to happen, but there's always a certain risk, you know? The Australian outback is super tough.

00:05:48 3000km, said before, it's like, well, everything can happen, you know, wind can come, there's there's rain, there's bushfire animals, whatever. So a lot can go wrong on, on this long journey. And of course, that's something what we don't hope for. But if there's a, if the problem, a mechanical problem arises, we have to fix it on the road. But we have a great team, so I'm confident we can do it. I am personally very nervous about the spiders, but that aside,

00:06:25 just seeing that everything works when we're there, because we can try it as much as we want to here, but then we're shipping it. While we hope that it's going to be okay We don't know what's going to happen on that airplane, we don't know what's going to happen when it arrives. Is there stuff that's going to malfunction in the heat, in, humidity in the dryness, which is I mean, there's going to be like a lot of sand, a lot of and we're coming in the winter for them, which is still going to be 25 degrees. So, like all of those aspects, the things that we can't really control and we won't know until we get there.

00:06:56 I think that's one of those, like, things that are going to be the most challenging. The longer we go, in sort of the process and seeing what the car is actually turning out, like, it's looking pretty decent. So all of the small, niggly bits that you, you're in a good sign process with like damn, I should have I should have knocked on that. We should have done this instead. When you see the full picture, you realize, yeah, no, but we did pretty well. everything is possible. Sounds a little bit cheesy, but it's true.

00:07:25 if you really want to learn, if you have a dedication, towards, a certain project, something that you want to do, even if in the beginning, maybe you don't feel capable to do it if you really if you're really serious, if you put your head down. Then you can you can make it happen. And, great things can come of it. And these great things, a lot of times also require a team effort. And yeah, this is definitely what I'm going to take away because, this is not possible without a great team.