Solar car put through its paces at Parkes airport

Western Sydney's Unlimited 5.0 solar car is an incredible piece of engineering - the first Australian made car to cross the finish line in the gruelling Darwin to Adelaide 2023 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge. Parkes had the chance to see it first hand - and chat to the team that built and drove it - when they visited our airport. The team had the chance to speed test the car while off-road at the airport, reaching speeds of 108km/hr, stress testing their vehicle in off-road conditions. The car is just 196kg in all - the team can physically lift it, team manager Nina Walters said. The body is made mostly of carbon fibre, with aluminium suspension, and its three-wheel design is for optimal aerodynamics. It's covered with an array that features four square metres 4m2 of Sunpower silicon solar cells, and has a battery. Solar car driver Alex Grima says it's an experience to drive - not necessarily comfortable without air conditioning, especially crossing the desert, but "absolutely fantastic". "It's a stiff and bumpy drive but at the same time it's a massive thrill-seek," he said after testing the vehicle in sunny conditions at Parkes. "It can get hot in there, it's labour intensive, but very rewarding to drive a car that I built with 25 of my friends." The team of 25 students from a range of areas of study come together to build the car within the guidelines for the challenge, which is run every two years but hadn't been held since 2019. The goal? To be first to traverse the 3022 km from top to bottom of Australia, pushing the boundaries in the name of research and development. "The challenge is designed to push innovation and to push the skill level of the next up and coming generation," Alex said. "By pushing the technology here, it helps them get further to that end goal of making it more commercial." For the students, it's a fantastic experience. Alex was delighted with their performance in the Challenge, the team was pretty much all-new due to the COVID-enforced gap between competitions. Unlimited 5.0 completed the journey - that in itself a feat - in five days with about 46 hours of driving time. Drivers work in stints of three to four-and-a-half hours, with three primary drivers and three back-up ready to take the wheel. Inside the vehicle, it's typically 10 degrees above ambient temperature, so as they're crossing the desert it can be 50 degrees in there. "As a team we ran flawlessly, couldn't have asked for any more," Alex said. They came to Parkes as part of their road show, which is another opportunity for the team to train as well as to test the car and its components in off-road environments as they prepare for the next challenge in 2025.