Hi everyone,
For a long time, I've been involved with the World Solar Challenge http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org -- 40 custom-built electric solar vehicles compete to be the fastest to cross from Darwin down to Adelaide. It's an awesome event travelling through some amazing landscapes. The event stops at 7 locations along the route (sometimes more, depending on the year), which led me to think that it would be possible to charge Tesla vehicles at those locations if we had some charging infrastructure (realistically, this would have to be a big generator in lots of locations). Those locations are all less than 500km apart (or there could be extra charge stops added), and if we could somehow get fast chargers there we'd be able to charge a series of cars.
There seems to be a whole lot of energy here (excuse the pun!), so I was wondering if anyone might be interested in trying to work out how to drive a set of solar cars along the route. It takes about four days to drive it, but in the Model S I think we'd probably stretch it out a bit.
It'd be a bold move to drive a rally of Model S cars through some of the most remote country on earth, but it'd be an amazing demonstration of the ability of the electric car.
It's just an idea and there's a bit of chicken-and-egg -- people would need to be interested, the event organisers would need to be sold on i it, and we'd need to work out the logistics and technical challenges of charging cars, moving fast chargers, etc (I was thinking of contacting Tritium to see if they'd like to participate). Perhaps Tesla or others would sponsor that side of things.
Cheers,
Dave.
For a long time, I've been involved with the World Solar Challenge http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org -- 40 custom-built electric solar vehicles compete to be the fastest to cross from Darwin down to Adelaide. It's an awesome event travelling through some amazing landscapes. The event stops at 7 locations along the route (sometimes more, depending on the year), which led me to think that it would be possible to charge Tesla vehicles at those locations if we had some charging infrastructure (realistically, this would have to be a big generator in lots of locations). Those locations are all less than 500km apart (or there could be extra charge stops added), and if we could somehow get fast chargers there we'd be able to charge a series of cars.
There seems to be a whole lot of energy here (excuse the pun!), so I was wondering if anyone might be interested in trying to work out how to drive a set of solar cars along the route. It takes about four days to drive it, but in the Model S I think we'd probably stretch it out a bit.
It'd be a bold move to drive a rally of Model S cars through some of the most remote country on earth, but it'd be an amazing demonstration of the ability of the electric car.
It's just an idea and there's a bit of chicken-and-egg -- people would need to be interested, the event organisers would need to be sold on i it, and we'd need to work out the logistics and technical challenges of charging cars, moving fast chargers, etc (I was thinking of contacting Tritium to see if they'd like to participate). Perhaps Tesla or others would sponsor that side of things.
Cheers,
Dave.
