Gadgetory

this is impulse a creation of the castle racing team it is a one hundred percent solar-powered race car it has a top speed of about seventy eight miles an hour although the team tells me that they won't go that fast again it's usually driven right around 30 miles per hour and even that is a little faster than I was willing to go okay all my favorite part helmet time I'm part of the team all right okay whoa okay no problem this is awesome this is a perfect okay that's on okay the sun is shining I'm shoved in here like a sausage and strapped in and then they're gonna close the lid and I'm off okay here we go there now we go now we're talking here we go over shifted gears this is awesome I feel like I'm doing so bad in the future cars will obviously need to be more energy efficient I'm probably going like 15 miles an hour we're already seeing more efficient cars today like electric vehicles and maybe solar could make those electric vehicles even more efficient let's get her all right I'm ready to be freed how was it and it's pretty great actually okay it's okay let go kart a mini cooper s no problem alright alright ratings whoa I've forgotten what it feels like to have full range of motion no it's that is actually that's a blast it's really fun yeah it handles like a dream it does we were racing it on a track and it can take corners better than real cars it's really surprisingly responsive yeah so where's all this research headed into actual street cars this technology you could apply directly to something like a Tesla Roadster you could panel the top of the vehicle with solar panels and then that would give you an extra boost in range so you would be able to go another three four hundred miles on a charge later this summer the cal team will take this car on a three-day track race against other schools the goal of the race to see who lasts the longest then they'll follow it up with an 1800 mile road trip these races are an experiment in green tech they're testing the limits of what a solar car can do so tell me what's going on with this car what is it what are the specs here so it starts with the solar array which is off right now so we can look at the car and then the solar array comes into that box right there okay and so this box is the power trackers and so that takes the energy from the Sun and converts it into electrical energy that we can use at the right voltage and power and that's just standard solar energy collection that everyone's pretty familiar with yeah that's fairly familiar from that it goes into our battery box so if we look in here all these white strips are our batteries give us a total power of 44 amp hours and so that will run us about three hours into the night with no electrical power from the Sun and what kind of batteries are there these are with you my own cells okay and so that goes directly into this box right down here this is the motor controller ok so our motor is actually a three-phase 1.6 horsepower motor as an electric motor that is actually in the wheel right back there 1.6 horsepower yep that doesn't sound very racecar it doesn't sound right race car but fine for us we're built for efficiency right and so the lower horsepower means that we can go with a lot less power it's not so bad it's hotter than blazes in here a Tesla Roadster without the range anxiety nice actually once i get to 10 or 12 miles an hour count me in driving around on a lawnmower it's like a riding lawnmower except powered by the Sun a riding lawnmower powered by the Sun this thing looks freaking define a mom