‘Yiihaaa as of this week Stella has a permanent license for the
public road!’ This is the latest tweet from Team Eindhoven, a team of Dutch
engineering students who built and raced ‘Stella’ — a four-seat family car — in
Australia’s biennial solar challenge in October last year.
I said then the student’s main achievement was ‘making a
solar-powered family saloon that is ready to go on sale in the real world’.
Pretoria-schooled Quirein Biewenga was in charge of Stella’s electrical storage
and said Stella draws most of its energy from the six square metre
roof-mounted solar panels, but it also has batteries for longer distances and
short bursts of acceleration. During the solar race, even the prototype Stella
proved as tough as a family car needs to be. Over half the field of 22 teams
pulled out before completing the 3 000 km trip from Darwin to Adelaide, but
Stella soldiered on.
And such is its comfort levels, the three team members not driving, snored as they slept. It was not the results of a hangover either, assured Biewenga.
In the other low-slung, stripped-out, Spartan solar cars, not even the hardest party animals could sleep a wink as they baked in the 40-degree heat and jolted over the rough roads during the morning-after ride.
And such is its comfort levels, the three team members not driving, snored as they slept. It was not the results of a hangover either, assured Biewenga.
In the other low-slung, stripped-out, Spartan solar cars, not even the hardest party animals could sleep a wink as they baked in the 40-degree heat and jolted over the rough roads during the morning-after ride.
