The students stood around their baby like family in a maternity ward, eagerly watching a newborn with pride and wonder.Their creation wasn’t flesh, blood and bone, but carbon fiber, Kevlar and Nomex, stretched over a skeleton of welded aluminum tubing.
Its heart is a three-phase electric motor. Sunlight gives it power.
This three-wheeled solar car is called the SunHawk and was hand built by electrical and computer engineering students at the State University of New York in New Paltz. Their pride in it is palpable.
Almost every inch of its lightweight, ocean-colored body shell—the design of which was borrowed from Massachusetts Institute of Technology—is plastered with silicon-based solar cells that absorb enough sunlight to fully charge the car’s lithium iron phosphate batteries from dead to full in four hours. Go easy on the throttle and it will keep a constant charge to drive indefinitely—as long as the sun’s out.
The students and their professor, Michael Otis, who oversees the solar car project, were generous enough to let Hannah Elliott and I behind the wheel of their $250,000 baby. (Read Hannah’s account here.)
And what a privilege it was.
Driving the Sunhawk around the campus’ winding roads is a highlight of my career that even overshadows a stint I took in a $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron several years back.
The fact that I almost crashed it helped sear the experience into my memory. But the car is spectacular in its own right and a bellwether for what the future of motoring could be—or perhaps should be.
The SunHawk isn’t pristinely constructed, and that’s part of its appeal. It is rough hewn, with exposed seams of epoxy, plastic zip ties to hold the top body shell onto the frame, and a bungie chord that keeps the scratched Plexiglass canopy in place.
Climbing in and out involves acrobatics. Once inside, discomfort is immediate. I had to sit so far forward to reach the pedals, and slouch so much to get the canopy closed that only my shoulders touched the vertical back rest.
The SunHawk doesn’t have Gallium arsenide solar cells like NASA and other schools with million-dollar budgets use. Nor does it have the most exotic construction: At nearly 600 pounds, it’s almost twice as heavy as some solar cars.
But the Sunhawk is robust. Its beefy, practical construction, with overbuilt suspension components and aluminum frame, just plain works. Last year, the SunHawk qualified on its very first try for the grueling American Solar Challenge, a 1,200-mile road race from Tulsa, Okla. to Chicago.
“Some teams who have been doing this for 10 years have never made it,” Otis says. It finished eighth in a field of about 20 entrants, some of which had to drop out before the end.
Hannah drove the car first and jokes in one of her posts about the steering wheel popping off before she got underway. That might seem alarming, but the steering wheel is actually designed to detach like on a race car, so it’s easier to slither into and out of the constricting aluminum cage. It probably wasn’t fully snapped into place when Hannah got in.
Good thing she found out before starting to drive. I wasn’t so lucky.
About halfway through my jaunt in the SunHawk, the brake pedal fell off. Unlike the steering wheel, it’s not designed to do that.
Nothing causes a sense of terror quite like pressing dead air where there once was a brake pedal. Initially, I thought maybe it was just that my clunky boot was having trouble connecting with the sliver of metal in the constricted footwell. But with a quick glance and a few more frantic foot flails, reality set in: I was going about 25 mph in a one-of-a-kind solar car with no way to stop.
I’m not sure how fast I was actually going, because the speedometer was one of many non-essential items the students left off in their haste to get the SunHawk assembled—during their Spring Break, no less—for us to drive. It lay in pieces, completely dismantled just the week prior.
Otis, leading in his Ford F150, was just pulling up to a stop sign at the crest of a small incline when the brake pedal disappeared. I hit the big red button over my left shoulder that cuts off power to the motor so hard that I jerked the steering wheel and scraped the curb.
It turns out there was another way to stop the car, but I only found out after my harrowing drive: A small brake lever, like on a bicycle, controls regenerative braking to the rear wheel and could’ve slowed the car down.
Fortunately the incline in the road brought the SunHawk to a halt and students in a vehicle behind hopped out and kept it from rolling backward. In less than a minute they reattached the pedal, which had dislodged itself from a connecting lever, and I was on my way again.
Failed brakes aside, the SunHawk was a blast.
It accelerates slowly at first, but builds speed quickly. The experience is raw and one any car enthusiast would relish.
Driving it reminded me of the open-wheel race car I was in at a Skip Barber Racing School several years back: You sit close to the road, no sound insulation, shrink wrapped in a metal cage with controls that are completely unfiltered—no power steering, no power brakes.
Pot holes and expansion joints in the road are jarring, but the car takes brisk turns with ease, thanks in part to a rather sophisticated suspension setup and what feels like decent weight distribution.
Even the three-phase electric motor adds to the drama, ripping out a loud sound similar to that of a small gasoline engine with a low-restriction muffler. Way cooler than the faint whistle the Chevrolet Volt or Nissan Leaf make under acceleration.
The motor hadn’t been overhauled since before last year’s 1,200-mile race and was still running strong, despite making a clacking sound from what Otis said was a result of being “out of phase.”
The SunHawk proves how viable solar-powered propulsion really is. In fact, the technology has gotten so good that schools participating in the American Solar Car Challenge are now going to be restricted in terms of how many solar cells and batteries their cars can have. “The technology can really stretch its legs,” Otis says. “I don’t doubt that this thing could probably go 90 mph. We haven’t tried that yet, but it’s possible.”
The main barrier to using solar power for transportation on a large scale is simply cost. “With a $30,000 to $40,000 solar array, if you get into a small fender bender, your $600 repair becomes a $20,000 repair,” say Ben Rounds, a SUNY New Paltz senior who lead the SunHawk’s development. “So for right now, with the current technology, I think charging stations make a lot more sense.”
18.19 . Comment . Read Post Again
Posting Komentar