Los Altos Solar Team

Can you believe that some high school students in California built their own car and raced it across the country? Can you believe that the grownups not only let them do this, but gave them money and school credit for it? I kid you not. It really happened.

Los Altos Solar TeamParticipating in the American Solar Challenge, and annual Solar vehicle race in which nearly one hundred Universities and High Schools from around the world participated, appears to the average, unbiased, and unscientifically-inclined observer, an incredibly daunting project. But Matt Casalicchio and Mike Marquez, a Senior and Junior, respectively, at Los Altos High School in Southern California, talk about it casually, modestly, without even allowing themselves the well-earned right to make the process sound complicated.

"Well," says Marquez, who is a mechanical engineer with the team, "One day I walked into an engineering class, and the rest is history."

Well. This from a guy who helped create a piece of machinery that rolls by the light of the sun. {here; explain how the cars work} The cars themselves look like giant computer chips; space-age match-box racers with little black rectangles glued all over them to make them look cool. The black rectangles, incidentally, are the solar panels, which are welded on, and designed to soak up as much sunlight as possible. They don't work completely well--they only are about 25% percent effective. However, they are effective enough to move these heaps at a decent clip: everyone, in other words, managed to make the highway speed limits. Also, they make the driver's cockpit almost intolerably hot. During the race, drivers worked in shifts. The members of the teams selected to drive first of all had to be small-boned, like jockeys, in order to fit in to the bubble-topped pits. They took the course in three-hour shifts, and a team member mentions that although there is a small ventilation hole, it's still really unpleasant waiting at stoplights.

Los Altos Solar Team Casalicchio, Team leader and one of the drivers, admits to one complication of a sort. "There was a little problem with team building at the beginning," he says off-handedly. Team building? Like getting a bunch of people to work well together? Sure that's hard even when you're talking about such demanding, intricate work as sorting out household chores (I think of my own family). I laugh, because down the road a University of Michigan team member was just telling someone how they crashed the car on the way to the finish line. But hey, they won the race with that astounding heap o' panels, so how bad could it be? That team and many others will be racing this November in Australia's World Solar Challenge. Name and Name aren't going to that one. But maybe next year, the team from Los Altos will make it.

If only there were a way for us all to drive clean, solar powered cars. But this technology, says Casalicchio, is far in the future. Right now, electric vehicles are the way to go for those of us concerned with breathable air and a tolerable climate.