02 Oct Outback Testing is Complete!

Welcome to the Australian Outback. A sign for a pass-through town reads “Population: Humans – 10, Cows – 50, Flies – 1,000,000.” The dust is orange, marking everything in its path. This is the 1,885 mile journey the Stanford Solar Car team will take as it races its new vehicle, Sundae, in the 2017 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge on October 8th.

In early September, we began to test our car in the South Australian Outback. We were stationed around Coober Pedy to acclimate our drivers to long drives in Outback conditions and test our strategy model. Every night, we debugged the car and made necessary improvements — and we did this through the end of September. During this time, we did a mix of caravan park and bush camping, eating PB&J sandwiches for breakfast, canned tuna sandwiches for lunch, and pasta for dinner!

Now that we are done testing and in Darwin, NT we have driven 3,033 km or 1,885 miles from Adelaide — the whole distance of the World Solar Challenge.
See our “WSC 2017” photo album on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pg/stanfordsolarcar/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1532260493462380) for photos of the route map, Outback, and race crew of 20 who, with the help of the rest of the team in the U.S., spent 20 months designing and building the car to get to this point. And stay tuned — we can’t wait to share more via Facebook and our Instagram (@stanfordsolarcar).