BRECKSVILLE: Starting early this Saturday morning in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, solar-powered cars designed and built by international teams of college students begin a dayslong rally that ends in South Dakota.
On Friday, the students displayed their high-tech cars at the Cuyahoga Valley Career Center in Brecksville, at the outer edge of the national park, for the public to examine.
“We came to check it out,” said Larissa Will, who brought her son, Spencer, 13, and daughter, Delaney, 10. “We like science and technology. ... They’re just cool to look at. It’s interesting to look at the design.”
Off-and-on rain did little to deter visitors to Friday’s show-and-tell event. The student teams happily demonstrated their cars, opening cockpits and even lifting the car bodies up to show off the technology underneath.
Colleges from the United States, Canada and Europe are participating in the rally. The teams brought in their cars and support vehicles after finishing the three-day Formula Sun Grand Prix track competition in Pennsylvania.
Spencer Berglund, 21, an engineering student at the University of Minnesota, said his team’s car, called Eos — the only two-seater in the competition — can run for 300 miles on a cloudy day.
On a sunny day, “you can drive indefinitely at 40 miles per hour,” he said.
Not that anyone would want to be in one of the cars indefinitely. Berglund and others noted that the vehicles are designed for efficiency, not comfort. There’s no air conditioning in the cramped cockpits.
“We’ve taken this up to 80 miles per hour,” Berglund said. “When you get up to speed, they stay there.”
But getting the car to reach that speed can take a minute or longer, he said.
The cars use as close to cutting-edge technology as the American Solar Challenge rules allow. Solar cells cover almost every square inch of top surface.
The car batteries are basically identical to the ones that power Tesla electric cars. Some vehicles use off-the-shelf motors and electronics, while others use custom-designed and -built components.
Bridgestone Americas, one of the main sponsors, supplied experimental tires designed specifically for solar cars.
The low-rolling-resistance tires can last 500 miles — 1,000 under some circumstances — before needing to be replaced.
Berglund and others noted that donors provide a lot of parts and other materials to the college teams.
He estimated that without donations, and when factoring in all of the engineering and design time the students put in, each solar car in the competition probably would cost a million dollars or more to make.
The public gets to look and ask questions at stops in nine national parks along the way as part of the 2016 National Park Service Centennial celebration.
The American Solar Challenge, organized by the Innovators Educational Foundation, is open to competitors from around the world and is held every other year. This year’s event is about 1,975 miles long.
The first car is scheduled to leave at 8:30 a.m. Saturday at 13614 Station Road — the Station Road Bridge Trailhead in the park in Brecksville — off Valley Parkway and next to the Cuyahoga River. Other cars then leave at one-minute intervals.
This first stage that ends Sunday takes them to Dayton, past Cincinnati and then into Indiana. The fourth and final stage will see the cars end up Aug. 6 at Hot Springs, S.D.
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him @JimMackinnonABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/JimMackinnonABJ