Back in March 2020, the Solar Car Team at UVA went home for spring break not knowing that it was the last time we would step foot in our workspace for an entire year. The trajectory of the team - just like the rest of the world - was thrown into complete uncertainty and for graduating fourth years, it was a rather anti-climactic end to a long engineering journey. The race being cancelled and our university prohibiting in-person team meeting for a year weren’t exactly encouraging news. However, it turns out that the pandemic may have given us the soft reboot we needed.

Over the initial weeks of the pandemic, it became increasingly clear that things were going to fall apart quickly for the team if our only plan was to wait it out. The newly elected leadership of the team decided that the only way forward was to begin designing a brand-new car. Although it meant scrapping the car that had been in development for almost 4 years, it also meant we could create a car that learned from an entire design cycle of growing complications. A car with golf cart motors, a hole ridden chassis, and a single PCB to control everything wasn’t necessarily the most competitive candidate. It’s true that teams have to start somewhere, but we’d prefer to start out with a car that could get past inspections and actually finish the race (sorry alumni). Lucky for us, we had access to all of tools needed to start designing. Synchronous CADs and shared repositories made it possible for us to work entirely over Zoom. The electrical team is building a distributed network of boards from the ground up using a custom real-time operating system. The mechanical team is revamping industry standard models with a paradigm prioritizing modularity and quick prototyping. Increased collaboration among sub-team leaders has helped us to create resources like a complete energy budget of the car’s power distribution and generation, a starting point for a solid racing strategy.

We’ve also been able to make strides in acquiring hardware that allows us to maximize efficiency – the most critical design parameter in a solar powered endurance race. Our new motor is a true solar electric racing motor that’s capable of accelerating us to 50mph. Its massive power output allows us to opt for a 1WD configuration, which is crucial to saving weight. The team was also finally able to acquire a machine called an autoclave, a project that’s been in our pipeline since the team began. This hulking 8,000 lbs. piece of equipment is a vessel that allows us to work with prepreg carbon fiber – the lightest strong material commercially available. By baking the carbon fiber right onto a precisely cut mold rather than cutting and pasting strips, we’re able to manufacture a significantly more aerodynamic outer shell.

As a team, we’re extremely proud of the progress we’ve been able to make from an entirely virtual operation. The help from our UVA and solar racing communities has played a pivotal role in keeping our productivity up. A year later and halfway done on our timeline to the race, we’re ready to build a car that well represents the hard work of everyone who’s ever been a part of this team. It’ll be refreshing to get back to our workshop, though the first thing we’ll probably have to do is clean up the mess we left...