Challenges

Building a solar car is all about overcoming challenges. There’s nothing conventional about it. You start from scratch, throw ideas out that meet design specifications, and when you think you’re on the right track, you produce professional drawings. These drawings are then used to build a physical piece of the car. Once your part is made, and you go to install it, then you realize it’s all wrong and start over again.

This is known as a single challenge – one of several million that our team has encountered, all in a hope to overcome the Panasonic World Solar Challenge. This means designing, building and racing our own solar car 3000 kilometers through the Australian Outback. Ultimately, I think the 5 days of racing will be the easiest.

You see, we’ve been encountering these challenges for about 2 years now. And they’re not just engineering related. We encounter issues with getting new team members and retaining them. We have problems making things happen instead of just talking. And we even have challenges just getting our team to Australia. In the last 6 days we’ve overcome just about every problem that we could encounter while traveling.

We started with a team member (who shall remain nameless to save face) bringing an expired passport to the Airport in Calgary. Solution: use their other passport of a different nationality. Then we had engine problems on the flight out of Calgary and departed late, just enough to miss our connecting flight in San Francisco. Throw in an airline that is incapable of taking care of it’s guests, and sometime around 3am we finally got to bed in a hotel, even though we left the hotel voucher in the taxi on the way there. Just to even things out, one of our bags was selected for secondary screening, and we thought we might never see it again.

Now by this point we’ve faced a lot of challenges, and haven’t even made it to Australia yet. We spent the entire next morning making sure we still had flights to Sydney and checking for lost baggage. Eventually it turned up going round about a carousel in the baggage area. Everything was going to be ok (especially seeing as there were important car parts in this bag).

There just wasn’t quite enough trouble yet, so on the way through security I was the lucky winner and got to participate in secondary screening. This meant everything I owned, including myself, was swabbed and checked for explosives. Our one saving grave in this entire episode was when we boarded the plane. Four of the five of us had emergency exit seats, meaning we had more leg room than business class. Finally something was going right. But the challenges didn’t stop there.
My bag didn’t make it Adelaide, but finally found me at our hotel. Our truck rental wasn’t allowed for persons under 25, but it was our lucky day. The trailer we rented wasn’t actually a confirmed reservation, but they found one. We weren’t allowed to take it to Darwin, but then they changed their mind. This list can go one.

So you see, I’m sitting here now, writing this, pondering our next challenge. We’ve got a long drive from Adelaide to Darwin ahead of us, and it’s bound to be full of surprises. At this point, I’m not too concerned about whether or not our car will make it through the race – I’m thinking our greatest challenge will be getting our entire team to Darwin.