I don't speak for Lawrence, but it looks to me as if he's is on a quest. He saw the "Stella" solar vehicle (look it up online) when it came through his area several months back. As you can see from the Stella's website, its builders are flogging the PR donkey hard, hoping to land a deal to get something like it into production. I suspect that Lawrence found their Kool- Aid pretty tasty. I probably would have too.
I may have misunderstood him, but Lawrence seems to think that Stella can run at highway speeds on just the output from its solar array, which is rated 1.5kW. I wonder if the Stella PR folks have been giving that impression. However, what I've read about it suggests that it needs all day in the sun to go 70km per day. That's still a pretty significant feat, but not the same as cruising on real-time sunshine. This is also where practicality rears its head. That might work when you're driving and parking under a cloudless sky on the open Australian outback, which is where the solar race is held. I'm not so sure it'll work as well on tree-lined suburban streets or city streets with tall buildings. And then there's the wintertime with shorter days and shallower insolation angles. What then? There's also the builder's situation. AFAIK, Stella's builders were a university team with lots of different technical skills and all the time and energy of youth. They also had a university's resources behind them. If they're like most university teams, they got a lot of high-dollar parts, tools, equipment, and services donated to them. My guess is that Lawrence doesn't want to wait for a production version (or suspects, as I do, that it'll be a cold day in hell before it goes into production). I think he probably wants to duplicate the Stella team's feat with a hobbyist's resources and connections. Can he do it? Maybe. I don't know his situation. If you're wealthy, you can solve a problem like this by throwing a few hundred thousand dollars at it. Or if you have lots of time on your hands, you can give it all your time, energy, and imagination, pretty much giving up the rest of your life. Single-minded inventors and developers have done amazing things on shoestrings in their back yards and garages, just by persevering, trying things until they found ones that worked. So - who knows? This kind of project is beyond what I personally would want to get into, in terms of time and potential financial commitment. But maybe I'm not typical. I say more power (sorry ;-) to Lawrence and wish him the best. I wish I lived nearby, so I could watch and cheer him on. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
