Solar car from Eindhoven rated street legal

A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology has created a solar powered family car that is street legal, Telegraaf reported last Tuesday.

The car called Stella was created by Solar Team Eindhoven in a bid to win the Cruiser Class of the World Solar Challenge in Australia this October. Stella is 4.5 metres long, 1.65 metres wide and seats four. It can go 430 kilometres on a single charge. The solar panel has only got an efficiency rating of 22%. Spokesperson Wouter van Loon told Bright last month that this was a conscious decision: “We could have opted for a space-grade panel, but this way we keep the car affordable.”

The car’s top speed is only 120 km/h because the special low-friction tires cannot handle more. In the past teams of the universities of Twente and Delft also participated in the World Solar Challenge. Delft’s car Nuna, shown here, won the race 4 times out of the 7 it entered, and in 2011 it finished second after Japan’s Tokai Challenger.

(Photo of Nuna5 by Nuon Solar Team, some rights reserved)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 17th, 2013 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Automobiles, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Australia, Eindhoven University of Technology, nuna, Nuon Solar, solar car, solar power, Stella, World Solar Challenge