A grueling 630-mile road race where the only fuel is sunlight

On July 19, dozens of teams of high school students will begin a five-day, 630-mile road race from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton, Texas. But this is not your typical contest. Students design and build the cars themselves, using off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed materials. The winner is the team that collects the most miles traveled. And the only fuel they can use to power their Frankenstein-like cars comes from the glowing mass of gas hanging in our sky: the sun.

This year is its 30th anniversary Annual Solar Car Challengea competition that brings together high school students from across the country with one goal: to build the fastest, most efficient solar-powered car. The race was founded in 1993 by Dr. Lyman Marks, a Texas educator with a long-standing interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Students learn a variety of skills through the challenge, including project management, budgeting, fundraising, and engineering. But mostly, they have to build a race-worthy solar vehicle that can hopefully go the distance.

Lyman said the solar car challenge grew out of his frustration with the state of STEM education in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, he had a group of students isolated and uninspired by learning only from textbooks, looking for a way to interest them. He accepted an invitation from a friend at the University of North Texas, who was building a solar-powered collegiate car for what was then an entirely new competition.

“We went there and the kids were fascinated by the complexity of the solar project,” Lee said. “And all the way back from Desmond to Dallas, they kept shouting, ‘Doctor, won’t you please let us build a solar-powered car?’

He relented, but soon realized that high school students would never be able to compete fairly against college teams because they lacked the technical expertise and financial resources available to universities. Thus the Solar Car Challenge for High School Students was born, with the educational program officially launching in 1993 and the first national competition in 1995.

Since its inception, more than 85,000 students have participated in the program in 39 states and multiple countries, including Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain and Singapore. There are currently over 260 active high school solar projects. The event alternates between on-track and cross-country formats, with this year’s event being a grueling 630-mile race through Texas. The five-day trip begins July 19 in Fort Worth and travels through the cities of Palestine, Round Rock, Fredericksburg and San Angelo, before ending in Fort Stockton. Lyman said townspeople come out and celebrate the teams every time they pass by.

Lehman stressed that it is not just about building a car. “It’s officially learning how to drive that car. At this upcoming event, one of the things I’ve been preaching to the kids is that before you get here, you have to put 500 miles on your car. You have to know, is it going to break down? You have to know, even if it breaks, let it break down in your parking lot so you can fix it.”

The race usually includes three categories of competition: classic, advanced and solar electric, where teams race electric cars that receive power from stationary solar power plants. This year’s challenge introduces a new division: the cruiser. In this category, teams build four-seat vehicles with solar arrays integrated directly into the vehicle body.

The decision to create a new division came after years of people wondering whether solar cars would resemble actual cars rather than flat, highly aerodynamic vehicles whose driver is often crammed under a vast solar panel. In fact, many of the cars barely resemble anything you’d recognize as road-worthy, looking like a cross between futuristic spacecraft and high-tech go-karts.

Organizers wanted the students to make solar-powered cars that looked like real passenger cars, with solar cells built into the car’s body itself, space for four passengers, four doors and a trunk, Lehman said. He believes this helps prove that solar-powered transportation can have practical applications, allowing people to imagine what solar-powered passenger cars would actually look like in the future.

“People might say, ‘Oh, that’s really cool, but it’s not reality,’” he said. “Now we can show them what it could be like. I think this is a step forward.”

Blake Wood is a 17-year-old rising senior from Benbrook Middle High School in suburban Fort Worth. He is also one of the leaders of the Old Rip Racing solar car team, one of the few independent teams in racing. Their 14-member team includes students from three different schools, which Wood considers their biggest strength, because it allows students who would otherwise never meet to collaborate on a common engineering challenge.

Wood says the team began planning about a year before the competition. Their first work consisted of paper drawings as they studied successful cars from previous years in the Classic Division, which was primarily intended for the first and second year teams. They analyzed what made those other cars work so well and incorporated those ideas into their initial concepts. As the project progressed, the team improved their computer-aided design (CAD) skills, gradually translating their hand-drawn concepts into digital engineering models. Learning design software has become part of the educational process.

“I think our car looks really nice to me,” Wood told me. “It’s unfortunate. So we don’t really get to see it very often, and we feel like we’re always fixing something or making something and then putting something back, and then we’re like, ‘Oh no, we need to weld in that area.’ “Let’s get this electrical component back.”

But while battery-electric cars have become mainstream, solar-powered cars have remained largely experimental. A number of startups seeking solar-powered cars have neither Focused on more proven technology or He went bankrupt. Wood says he’s optimistic that solar vehicles have real potential in the long term, as long as educational competitions like the Solar Car Challenge continue to expose students to renewable energy technologies at an early age. As participants eventually enter professional careers, they can continue to develop the innovations needed to make solar transportation commercially viable.

“We are making progress,” Wood said. “I mean, we have quite a few high school students making this stuff, and I think with the right equipment and a little more experience than we all have, I think it could definitely be possible.”

Lyman agrees, pointing out Startups like Aptera Which is still pursuing the goal of producing a solar-powered car for the mass market. But he said commercialization was never the real goal of the Solar Car Challenge.

“People say, ‘Well, are you trying to build a better solar car?’ He said, ‘Between you and me you’re not.’ “I’m trying to build a capable student, who learns commitment and dedication to the project, who learns teamwork, who learns engineering and battery technology. “I’m trying to build a workforce and I’m trying to build engineers.”