Japanese take World Solar Challenge

Unfortunatly, all this really proves is that solar vehicles will never be practical for the majority: these are highly optimised prototype vehicles, yet they can barely manage highway speed for a single lightweight passenger, under almost optimum (solar) conditions. So, if you put the same amount of solar panels on a family-sized car then you will barely have enough power to move the vehicle itself, never mind a full load. If used as a boost / recharge for a plug-in electric vehicle, then the cost would be about triple that of the base vehicle, ie you would be better to buy three, leave one plugged in at home, one plugged in at work, and one to shuttle in between.

It's F1 racing for geeks who don't want to look like planet destroyers

The WSC is now an extreme (expensive) "sport". Sadly, the total cost of entry is now in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even for those on a "shoestring" budget. For most schools, such things are now well out of reach. It's become a spectator sport that is very, very boring.

And unlike F1, where one has reasonable control of the operating environment, "competitors" have no reliable way of telling how much "fuel" they'll have; and when. Given the variability of conditions, even finishing the distance in the allotted time has only about 90% probability with a "perfect run". Even knowing how the weather is about to change doesn't help significantly with the leading (best) cars which are restricted to the speed limit formuch of the distance. Finishing in half the time ... less than 50%.

It's a huge gamble. It's a casino. We know who wins in a casino.

Even the best strategist, running a perfectly-engineered car and team won't help if there's a cloud-bank persistently between your car and the sun. Your best strategy is to rely on the unreliability and misfortune of those with notionally-quicker cars.

No

In a sense, a better horse is precisely what we have - a small, enclosed metal horse that runs on hydrocarbons rather than hay, and is similarly independent of weather conditions. However good solar cars get, it is always going to be the case that they perform better in nice weather.

Solar panels may be part of the solution, in the same way in which wind turbines are part of the sustainable electricity generation solution, but are unlikely ever to be the whole solution.

Incidentally, electric cars work fine now on the "better horse" basis - we just need a horse/battery swapping infrastructure to support them.

Be fair to constructors

Solar car racing is not a "hobby" (for most). It's a learning exercise for students. Usually university students. And with limited budgets, tight schedules to fit into busy study timetables, it doesn't leave much time to develop craftsmanship, let alone refinement.

There is some opportunity for re-use and refinement in long-lived vehicles; cars that are competitive and adaptable to changes in rules. But many choose to start over again, carrying over almost nothing tangible from previous cars.

Construction is hard. Least of all because many things have to be built from scratch; from near-raw material in order to be application specific, allowing a reduction to the simplest, lightest component that will do the job. They often end up re-inventing wheels.

But such isn't a bad thing in the bigger picture. It's a learning exercise for the participants.

Solar cars will never be practical for ordinary transport. The energy source is too diffuse and unpredictable for reliable transport. The actions of inventing and developing novel, "practical" solutions to problems; and facing up to their "failure" are valuable lessons. Expensive ones, but not nearly as bad as mobile phones "bursting into flames" because the battery management system doesn't have working fail-safes.

Here's a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg:

http://scg.levels.unisa.edu.au/src/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

It's a little dated but sufficiently vague to be malleable to current conditions and technologies.