The University of Michigan has a solar car team that started in 1989. It has won 6 1st place trophies in the North American Solar Car race. The 2012 North American race starts in Tulsa, Oklahoma and ends in Naperville, Illinois. The race is 1200 miles. The team has also finished 3rd place in the world solar car race in Australia 4 times; the latest was in 2009. The 2012 Australian race starts in Darwin Australia and ends in Adelaide Australia, 1800 miles from start to finish. The team is made up of all students from the University of Michigan, and they come from a variety of majors. According to their website, it takes two years to make each car, and once one if finished they immediately start on a new one.
The car team is broken down to 4 different areas; Engineering Division, Business Division, Strategy Division, and Operations Division. The engineering division builds the car and has aerodynamics and body, mechanical, electrical, and micro-electrical sub divisions. The business division does the advertisement and procures the parts that are needed to build these cars. The cars cost over 1.2 million dollars. The strategy division takes care of the performance of the car, weather issues and monitoring, and they custom design the computer programs that help harness and utilize the solar energy. The operations division does the shipping and takes care of the set up and operations of the base camp while in Australia.
If you’re a student at The University of Michigan, you can always try to join and help out the solar team. You just might have to take a semester off if you are picked to go to Australia (but who would turn that down), and since October is spring in the land down under, maybe you could count it as Spring Break.
I will be trying to follow the Solar team and the car Quantum on its journeys this year. #Go Blue.
http://solarcar.engin.umich.edu/about-us/
this is the website for the UM Solar team
http://www.facebook.com/umsolar#!/umsolar
The facebook page
@UMSolarCarTeam
This is the twitter account.
