A group of University of Toronto (U of T) students are planning to drive 3,000 kilometres in a solar-powered race car across Australia.
U of T’s Blue Sky Solar Racing (BSSR), a team of students working together to build and race solar cars, will compete in this year’s World Solar Challenge in Australia starting on Oct. 18. The race will last five days, and the team will drive from Darwin to Adelaide from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day.
BSSR is the only Canadian team competing this year alongside more than 40 other teams from across the world.
The team’s car is named “Horizon,” and took roughly two years to build.
Nicole D’lyma, a team leader for BSSR, said Horizon is “very light and the steering is also quite sensitive.”
“You’re cramped up in a small space and you’re kind of just sitting still the whole time,” she said.
However, D’lyma said Horizon has similarities to a normal car.
“The car does have to be road legal—so there are turning signals, there’s break lights . . . There’s a steering wheel [and] brake pedal,” she said.
Horizon wasn’t cheap to build, she said, but BSSR got help from certain groups such as U of T’s engineering faculty to help cut costs.
“We use a lot of aerospace-grade materials, [which] can get pretty expensive. For example, the entire shell is made of carbon fibre,” she said.
Amir Kharazmi, a computer engineering student at U of T, said he’s worked on the manufacturing stage of Horizon for about six months. He said many of Horizon’s sponsors donated materials to the project for free.
Kharazmi said the “big difference between the solar car and a normal car is as a driver, you’re not really in control of deciding how fast you want to go.”
He said the speed of the car depends on a lot of factors, such as cloud coverage and battery voltage.
During the race, Horizon will be driving between a “lead” car in front of it, and a “chase” car behind. Team members drive both of these cars and monitor the power of Horizon, D’lyma said.
“It’s an endurance race and you have to manage your power a lot,” she added.
Right now, BSSR is in Australia. They arrived more than two weeks early to prepare for the race.
“I’m definitely excited and feel ready . . . But at the same time I know that there’s still quite a bit of work for us before we can get to the race,” D’lyma said. “We’re just testing on the Australian roads, fixing up the car as needed, just trying to get ourselves ready for race conditions.”
Out of the 45 teams competing, only about a quarter of them will actually finish the race using solar power, she said.
Kharazmi said the “ultimate goal” of the race is not to win, but to learn.
“What we sort of strive to achieve is getting hands-on experience for all our members … to get experience with power tools, get experience with design,” he said.
“Finishing the race entirely on solar power,” Kharazmi added. “That would be winning the race for us.”
