The Hidden Winners in Solar Car Racing

July 21, 2008

Just ask the financial backers of the X Prize: a little competition is one of the best ways to kick-start technological innovation. It’s hard to cite exactly where the trend begins; a highly publicized tug-of-war sounded the death-knell for paddlewheel-powered boats and ushered in the propeller. Early race-bred innovations transformed the automobile into a reliable, powerful vehicle for everyday use, and advances in bicycle technology from the highest levels of racing continue to trickle down to improve consumer bikes.

But for some reason, this hasn’t been the case with solar cars. Although the inaugural World Solar Challenge took place more than two decades ago, the solar car has failed utterly to penetrate the automotive market. While the fleet of futuristic vehicles, looking something like wheeled spaceships from a Tom Swift story, has increased top and average speeds significantly over the seven editions of the event, to the point where posted road speeds have begun interfering with the racers, the solar car has simply not presented itself as a viable market contender.

Critics of such events might be tempted to blame the relative impracticality of the races, which are generally carried out in open, arid areas, with ample sunlight and limited changes in elevation. Other race criteria, such as requiring only a single-passenger along with a limited focus on acceleration and handling also seem to hamper adaptation of the developed technologies by a wider audience.

But such an analysis misses the point. While the racecourse itself all but guarantees that the winner will be a completely unviable commercial product, the developments involved in creating that car are the true focus of most solar race events. With the limited power offered by solar, aerodynamics becomes a critical factor, and such close attention to these details carries over easily into the wider consumer market. Honda’s Insight, for example, drew a great deal of its unprecedented fuel efficiency from carefully studied aerodynamics.

Additionally, races focused on undergraduate and graduate school competitors -- such as the North American Solar Challenge, with futuristic vehicles currently en route from Plano, Texas to Calgary, Alberta -- not only lead to new advances, but allow the automotive and solar engineers of the future to cut their teeth in a competitive, real-world situation. The benefits reaped from such events are not an immediately viable product, but an investment in of technologies in the future that will provide useful in a variety of situations: from the strictly automotive adaptation of solar panels as an auxiliary charging source, to the thin-film solar panels though to be coming in Apple’s next line of laptops.

Photo by Stefano Paltera, courtesy of North American Solar Challenge