After many phone calls and a ton of email traffic, we’ve managed to resolve our differences with DB Schenker. They’ve reduced their rates to match those of a competing shipper and released our Carnet so we can go ahead with the other company.

They also let us know that their communication to the other solar car teams was better and that nobody else had anywhere near so many problems as we did. Hopefully that’s the case and everybody is leaving Australia with no noteworthy events!

We chose to ship our vehicles to Australia through the official WSC shipping company – DB Schenker. Up front they seemed to provide a competitive price, about $6000 each way for a 40′ shipping container.

After the fact they’ve tacked on thousands of dollars of hidden fees that they didn’t bother to notify us about on the way out. It seems like they’ve acted in a way to trap us with their services regardless what price they want to charge. I’m sure there are other teams in a very similar position.

Then they send representatives to try and placate us who have no decision making power to make things right. If allowed to have their way, DB Schenker will have charged nearly $22,000 for the round trip to Australia and back. That’s about three times what we paid for similar services back in 2007, and 100% more than what they indicated up front.

This is simply unacceptable corporate behavior, and you can be sure that we’re going to fight this in every way we can. Let this be a warning to other solar car teams going forward, as well as to anybody else considering doing one-time shipment with this sleazy company.

Stanford Legal has been notified of the situation.

We think we’re going to finish in fourth place in the silicon class. Granted only four silicon cars will have finished completely under their own power, but that still feels pretty good. We’ve crossed a continent without really big issues.

We pulled over once to reset the emergency disconnect, and once to change a hardpoint tab for the suspension. Other than that, nothing has taken our car out of commission. It’s perhaps the most reliable car SSCP has made in quite some time. Our total “side of the road” time was about 20 minutes for the whole race.

Right now the plan is to continue working on the car as we design new things for our next vehicle. If the team decides to go to NASC 2010, Apogee will come along as well. We’re thinking we might do it with a new top shell and multijunction cells left over from Equinox.

Sitting in the back of the van, I’m designing the next revision of our power trackers.

We won’t make it tonight, but hope to roll in tomorrow morning. The array has only been putting out about 550 watts, so we’ve been cruising at 50 km/h. It’s bad news, but we have a plan to try and fix our issues.

Blowing up a bunch of the tracker circuitry at the race track certainly didn’t help. We’re now running in open loop control, and that’s not exactly good. We have some other hardware in the back of the truck that may help us get some of the data back, but it’s not necessarily going to work.

We’ve passed our first control stop at Katherine and are now out on our way to our night stop, likely an abandoned airstrip.

We passed dynamic scrutineering without any issues – except Ben did it about twice as fast as the judges wanted and we had to do it again. Our hot lap time was 2′08″, among the faster cars. I think Aurora was 2′02″ and MIT was 2′49″.

After testing our car between Coober Pedy and Alice Springs two days ago, DC suggested that we drive through the night to get to Darwin on the 20th. None of us could come up with a reason not to. As it got darker, the kangaroos showed up- which made the driving much more interesting. This country has ridiculously straight roads, so in my opinion anything that makes the driving more interesting must be a good thing.

Anyway, we made it to Darwin on the 20th at about 5pm. Today we’re going to be fixing up all the loose ends for scrutineering tomorrow.

Testing the solarcar

3G coverage out here is surprisingly good. We’re in the middle of farm country, and I’ve got a solid 5-bars HSDPA connection. Amazing!

We know all you really want are the pictures… Here’s the convoy somewhere about a third of the way to Adelaide. We’re preparing to drive the car for a bit while the weather is nice:

DC getting ready to go driving:

Out on the road, a view from the rather large truck. Sadly, the solar car team’s van is probably the most nimble vehicle in the group and always in the way of getting a good look at the car.

And when we decided to pack the car back up, we finally managed to take a decent team photo. About time!

In case you didn’t click Ben’s shameless plug, here are some immediately accessible pictures from the workshop in North Coburg. The guys there were fantastically helpful and remarkably happy to lend us their spare space. Aside from the security guard, everybody was extremely cheerful. We met lots of students, teachers, and administrators and tried to answer as many of their questions as possible.

Thanks again guys!

Thanks to the generosity of the folks at the Kangan Batman TAFE automotive training facility in northern Melbourne, we’ve spent the last two days prepping the car for the drive to Adelaide. We still have a lot of testing to do before we can call it ready, so we’re looking forward to getting miles on it in the drive up to Darwin.

Click here for more photos of the car (on my/nathans/DCs/marvins/matts trip blog)

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