Last week I had a student who tried as hard as he could to answer any question he could with a reference to the car company Bugatti. I would be teaching about the importance of conserving fossil fuels, and he was thinking about a car that gets 13 mpg on the highway and 3 mpg at top speed. It seemed there was a cultural gap between us that  could not easily be crossed. How can we reach students who have never heard of geothermal heating, and believe that the peak of all existence would be to do 220mph on a race track? The news this week brought me some sunny inspiration.

Every year teams from around the world build special race cars for the World Solar Challenge. The cars must run fully on Solar power and race more than 1,800 miles across Australia.

This year’s World Solar Challenge had some challenges with a stretch of the road being closed down until a brush fire was extinguished. Officials believe the fires were set on purpose. One car from Philippines was delayed when the batteries exploded. No one was injured in the accident and the car was able to continue the race after being repaired.

Each car must be inspected before the race and can begin the race only with a 10% charge on their batteries. The winning team was from Tokai University in Japan, and completed the race in 4 days. A US team from the University of Michigan took third place.

Spectators of the race were able to test drive a wide variety of production cars from companies around the world who have developed low-to-zero emissions vehicles. Many of the technologies that are developed for the World Solar Challenge are used to improve these production vehicles.

Though these cars may never be able to keep up with my student’s dream car, it is pretty amazing that we have the technology to drive across the Australian dessert without burning any gas during the trip.

Dan Bowman

 It gives me a little ray of hope that we may still be able to appreciate the beauty of a road trip even as gas prices seem to flirt with being prohibitively expensive. For my students, this race can give them an idea of how diverse cars can be, and give them an opportunity to choose more wisely what kind of cars they will be excited about when they are old enough to buy one.

For more information on the race click here.