Austin got a big treat, and an honor to be the starting point for two major solar car races — the high-school level race I posted about a week ago and the 2005 North American Solar Car Challenge, a college-level race that set out this morning. Unfortunately, it was raining as they filed out of town, so the race wasn’t off to as spirited a start as one might have hoped.

I checked out the cars as they were on display yesterday afternoon, and the designs were very impressive. Lots of custom tube frames, carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb composites. And a few unprompted words I happened to overhear from a faculty advisor for the Michigan team echoing most EVer’s opinion about hydrogen — it’s an inefficient idea with a laundry list of difficult and important problems that will eventually fade as the automotive industry comes back to the technology it panned in the late 90s — batteries. For the record, I did see one hydrogen-powered car at the show-and-tell event downtown on Saturday, though I’m not sure how it figures into the solar car race.

Local press coverage for this and last week’s high school race here. My camera dump from Saturday here. I believe that Aaron Choate (also of AustinEV) has some better pictures than mine; if so I’ll post a link.

An AustinEV member, Andrew Donoho, has volunteered his 2004 Toyota Prius for checking out the EV mode option from Coastal Electronic Technologies. The option enables operation of the vehicle without gasoline up to speeds of 34-35mph, and to a deeper battery discharge level than the Prius would otherwise allow.

This option is actually a standard feature in the Prius, almost everywhere it’s sold except the United States, where Toyota must continue to defend the stigma it’s campaigned to place on battery-powered vehicles. After a false start, we ended up getting the retrofit device installed, and it worked exactly as advertised.

Pictures posted here.

A stressful but fun Thursday, as I took off work for the day to volunteer as a technical inspector, or scrutineer for the Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge.

In the searing heat of a freshly-laid black asphalt parking lot (which reportedly reached 150 degrees on the surface), Mark Farver and I represented AustinEV by volunteering to help perform safety inspections of the solar cars prior to the start of the race on Friday. Being involved with electric vehicles made us well-suited to performing electrical system inspections, so we manned station 2, inspecting such things as fuse ratings, battery placement and restraint, solar array sizing and wiring safety.

At the end of the day, we were totally exhausted and a bit burned (I had a sunburn even under the brim of my hat thanks to a bright white t-shirt), but a little sad we couldn’t stay on for the next two weeks as race judges. Though I may never be able to spare two straight weeks from work, this is something I’m certain I’d like to be a part of again in the future.

Photos on Flickr.

UPDATE: Photo gallery now installed. Though it’s not very well integrated with the rest of the site yet, you can see all the photos from Thursday and Friday morning here.

Just got back from a long day of putting stuff back together on Nick Viera’s converted Jeep Cherokee and was rewarded finally by getting to ride in it for the first time since he’d installed the new 1000-amp controller. The difference between that and his old 600-amp setup is enormous. As for the transmission swap that prompted these recent efforts, the new one is far less noisy and though we will ultimately know only when we have some hard data (watt-hours per mile, etc) it did seem to coast longer and have a little more power on tap than before the swap, he says. For me, the ride alone made the day worth it.

What I should consider a bonus are the small lessons that I would do well to pay attention to, as I plan my own conversion. The first of these lessons is design for maintenance. It takes longer, and in some respects requires some skill in predicting how certain design choices can create a nightmare later on. But the effort bears much fruit, as exemplified by something pretty unremarkable — nuts. Putting together battery racks and re-mounting equipment, the process was frequently slowed by dropping nuts and washers on the floor, which often needed to be held underneath while a bolt was inserted from the top. In nearly all of these cases, the nut could have been welded on underneath, making the entire operation faster and doable entirely from above with only one tool. Another example would be standardization of fasteners — try to have as few different fastener sizes as possible. Inside the Jeep there are about as many different sizes as their are bolts. Some of this is unavoidable, but the more standardization you have, the less time you have to spend remembering what bolt goes where.

The second lesson is the value of ziplock bags. When you disassemble something, place all its fasteners in a bag, label it, and file it. Failure to do this cost us time and money as some bolts we couldn’t find had to be replaced.

Note that none of this discussion is intended to malign Nick’s vehicle or his skills. On the whole the Cherokee is an impressive achievement, most notably since Nick began the project while still in high school (he is now about to begin his freshman year in college). Also, although Nick deserves credit for most of the design of the vehicle, Mark Farver and I did help with the construction of the battery racks, motor mounts, etc — so if some things aren’t quite what they could be, we can’t pretend we weren’t involved.