MIT's latest solar race car might look like a funky Ikea table with a hump, but don't laugh. It'll do 90 mph and is packed with technology that may end up in the hybrids and EVs the rest of us will soon be driving.
The university's Solar Electric Vehicle Team, the oldest such team in the country, unveiled the $243,000 carbon-fiber racer dubbed Eleanor on Friday and is shaking the car down to prepare for its inaugural race later this year.
"It drives beautifully," said George Hansel, a freshman physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the team. "It's fun to drive and quite a spectacle."
Eleanor is slated to compete in the tenth World Solar Challenge, a seven-day race across nearly 2,000 miles of Australian outback.
Vehicles competing in the endurance race may look hopelessly impractical, but the competition is a test bed for batteries, motor technology and power-management systems that may eventually appear in hybrids and electric vehicles. Like Formula 1 and other big-budget motor sports, the solar challenge helps develop some of the vehicles we see in showrooms.
"It pushes the technology from the books to real life," said Spencer Quong, senior vehicles analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It opens the industry's eyes to how to build a more efficient vehicle."
Like, say, the Chevrolet Volt range-extended EV, the forthcoming electric car that General Motors has all but bet its future on.
The Volt is a direct descendant of the Sunraycer solar car General Motors developed with AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft in 1987. Sunraycer smoked the rest of the grid in the inaugural World Solar Challenge, raising quite a few eyebrows back in Detroit.
"The unexpected success of the Sunraycer made GM leadership take notice as to what might be technologically possible," said Jon Bereisa, a longtime member of GM's advanced-propulsion team who is now working on the Volt. "It finished the race across Australia a full three days ahead of its competitors, powered by an electric motor that consumed as much power as a hair dryer, at speeds up to 45 mph, and the solar-powered batteries were still fully charged."
MIT Unveils 90 MPH Solar Race Car
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Yaheli
Guest
And do we want to end up with no hydrogen and water?
Y
Yaheli
Guest
People thought the same about gasoline.
Y
Yaheli
Guest
Zezombia said:
Ok then, what happened to all the gasoline our cars use? It turns into CO² in our atmosphere and is no longer usable as a power source.
Now, would you rather use sunlight which will last for the next 5 billion years or hydrogen, which with a rise in technological development in third world countries and rapid growth of earth's human population will run out faster?
Also, As an article published in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review stated:
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that
The Economist magazine in September 2008, quoted Robert Zubrin, the author of Energy Victory, as saying:
Do some research guys.
Yc-jySS7rzQ[/media]&NR=1]How do you like me now, bitch?
Do you know what cars powered by hydrogen release into our atmosphere? HO2 thats right! W-A-T-E-R. Don't believe?
These cars already exist.
TOfzbaglUOo[/media]
Take a look.
These cars already exist.
TOfzbaglUOo[/media]
Take a look.