UNSW students targeting 1000km solar EV world speed record

A group of 50 Australian students are in with a shout of setting a new solar car land speed record later this year with their new Sunswift 7.

The cutting-edge solar electric vehicle has been designed and built by the UNSW Sydney Sunswift Racing team and will take a swipe at the Guinness World Record for the Fastest Solar Electric Car over 1000km in December, at the Australian Automobile Research Centre in Wensleydale, Victoria.

Built around a carbon-fibre chassis (and bodywork), the Sunswift 7 weighs less than 500kg and is said to be able to cover 1200km on a single charge of its battery – perfect for the nominated 1000km record distance.

The vehicle itself is covered from nose to tail in solar panels and features a surprisingly pronounced cockpit and silhouette compared to other solar race cars, though the elevation gain between the bonnet and roof is offset by a steeply raked bubble windscreen.

According to the University of New South Wales, designers went back to the drawing board 57 times before settling on the final design. The hard work has clearly paid off, given the Sunswift 7 has an incredible drag coefficient of just 0.095Cd.

The slippery figure will be one of the key factors in the record attempt, and the team is confident their creation will be able to average more than 120km/h over the course of the attempt, which is expected to take around eight hours if all goes well.

With no air-conditioning, anti-lock brakes, airbags or even windscreen wipers, eight hours would be a long and potentially dangerous stint for any driver and co-driver pairing, which is why the Sunswift 7 can and will be piloted remotely for the record attempt by none other than reigning Bathurst 1000 champion Chaz Mostert.

Mostert will also pilot the car around the Mount Panorama circuit in October using a virtual headset connected to the 5G receivers and cameras fitted to the vehicle’s body and nervous system.

The whole project has been overseen by professor of practice and former Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team operations chief Richard Hopkins, who said he merely guided the students at a few key points and left the rest up to them.

“This is the result of the hard work of 50 undergraduate students who are very dedicated, very focused and very talented,” he said.

“They were given the freedom to create. The criteria was simply: build a car that has solar powers and a battery.

“I had very little influence over what they chose to do within that – I just wanted them to make the best engineering decisions.

“Sunswift 7 is the manifestation of their collective minds, who on day one probably had very little idea what they were doing. And now to produce this amazing car is just insane.”

UNSW has been building and developing solar race cars for more than 25 years, with its first car rolling out of the campus back in 1996.

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