The ultimate dream of electric vehicle enthusiasts is a solar-powered car that looks, feels, and performs like a conventional gas-powered automobile. The Sunswift Eve is the latest solar car effort from the University of New South Wales, taking years of solar racing experience and loading it into a car designed for the mainstream.
Solar-powered cars have been around for decades, though mostly they have raced back and forth across the Australian Outback in low-speed races with funky-looking rides.The University of New South Wales Sunswift team has participated in these races since 1995, fielding four different solar-powered vehicles and even winning the 2009 World Solar Challenge silicon class. This is a team with plenty of experience drawing performance from the sun.
Taking that racing experience and translating it into a road-going automobile is something major carmakers do all the time. While performance details haven’t been mentioned yet, it basically looks to be a lightweight fiberglass couple-style body covered in solar panels and sporting a very aerodynamic design. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of performance they can draw out of this thing.
Could we see legitimate solar-powered cars in our lifetime? Seems a bit ambitious and too sci-fi, but it has to start somewhere, and maybe the Sunswift Eve points the way forward.
Source: Autoblog Green
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