Intro to Solar Car, Part 2

Alright, a few good things to know if you're going to follow the rayce:

-First, helpful terms and abbreviations:
> Race is indeed spelled with a "y," sun ray-ce... haha, so clever.
> SVP stands for "Solar Vehicle Project" and usually means the U of M solar car team, though sometimes it is used to refer to solar car-related stuff in general.
>Array: the collection of solar cells we use on the car.
>NASC: North American Solar Challenge
>EE: Electrical Engineering, referring to one of our design teams. The other team abbreviations should be self explanatory.
>Shell: you'll hear this a lot; it's the big, red part of the car that is aerodynamically efficient, holds our solar array, and pops off the car when we need to take a look at the chassis.
>Chassis: the body of the car, made out of paneling, which holds the battery box, the driver compartment and roll cage, the suspension, etc.

-The rayce is the North American Solar Challenge. It is usually held every two years, and this year it goes 2500 miles from Dallas, TX, to Calgary, Alberta (Canada). There will be about 26 teams competing for the win, which is determined by the car reaching the finish line in the shortest amount of time.

-Our car is the Centaurus, the eighth car built by the University of Minnesota Solar Vehicle Project. The Centaurus generation is preceded by the Aurora generation, and the Borealis generations, which Caleb and Jaymes worked on (Borealis III).

-Our team is the UMNSVP, team #35. We are one of the few teams in competition that have students design and build the vast majority of our car and its components. We have four design teams, Aerodynamics, Array, Electrical, and Mechanical (my team). We also have Executive, Strategy, and Logistics Teams (I'm also helping with Logistics).

-Our team's photostream can be found on Flickr, as can my own collection of SVP photos, which is unlikely to be updated during the rayce as I shoot film.

-Most of the neat little facts about the car can be found on the team's website (see Centaurus, above), but feel free to ask any questions you have by commenting on posts. It's an interesting project, and I've found that people in solar car love nothing more than talking about solar car.

Intro to Solar Car

Hey All,

I will be leaving Minnesota next week for a three-week stint as a caravan-bound traveling solar vehicle gypsy engineer. I know, exciting weirdness.

And I know it's going to be absolutely ridiculous, and I'm going to have great quotes and stories, and, ya know, the status of Centaurus (our wicked awesome solar car) in the eternal burning of our competition with Michigan for anyone who's interested in that, so I'm going to try to post every now and again on the road (I'm in charge of making sure we have hotels with wifi, so shouldn't be a problem)...

So this is the place to find all that. It'll be the only publicly-accessible source of solar car quotes, I'll try to actually form a few complete sentences of my own, and I'll link to my Flickr photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/quotecooper/) or YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/RockinHobbit) if I have any pics or video to share (although I generally shoot film, so I doubt I'll be posting photos until I get home).

Just a heads up.
Peace, Love, and Release Tape;
~Taylor