 The solar car is a all-encompassing, all-consuming pursuit. Everything else goes out the window. Girlfriend, parents, friends. Eating, sleeping, certainly. It was worth it because it changed my life completely. When you make something, and you can see it working, it's just amazing. Actually being out there and driving a car that you build yourself is just incredible. Most of the students in our team find it really easy to find really great jobs when they graduate from Stanford. So we have folks that go in a company like Boeing or SpaceX, Tesla. The solar car experience was the most important thing I did at Stanford. There will be classes that you took that you don't remember at all. But going to Australia and driving your car across a continent under the power of the sun and only under the power of the sun together with your friends is a defining experience that you will remember until the day you die. So I'm really excited to be here today. We're here to celebrate our 25-year history at the Stanford Solar Car Project. The Stanford Solar Car Project was founded in 1989 here at Stanford by some really driven engineering students. It's an entirely student-run group. What we do is we design, build, test, and then finally race solar-powered vehicles. So we compete every two years in something known as the World Solar Challenge. It's a really large event held in Australia. We are required to drive 2,000 miles across the entire Australian outback just using solar power alone. It's a really competitive event. It's really difficult. This past race was one of the most exciting in our recent history. Our latest car, Luminos, which raced in the 2013 World Solar Challenge, this very grueling race. It did very well. We're here at the start of the 2013 World Solar Challenge. Over the next couple of days, our team will be driving around 2,000 miles across the Australian outback. We think we have a very robust vehicle that's also efficient. So we're looking for a top five finish, hopefully, in this year's race. The race itself has teams from about over 20 other countries. It allows you to see that there are really good engineers and meet really good engineers from every country and every continent in the world. I really think that's a really cool part of the experience. This year we had 15 or 16 team members from Stanford. They're participating in the race. I do love World Solar Challenge. It's so pure as a race. Just point A to point B, first one there wins. Point A to point B happened to be 2,000 miles apart across some of this inhospitable land on the planet. I love that. I found that I really like collaborative engineering. I have a lot of fun because I get to work with a lot of really smart people at Stanford. I'm a rising sophomore at Stanford. I'm majoring in mechanical engineering. Try going a little, like, a few degrees more vertical. Okay, stop. I've actually taken three quarters off for solar car. I will finish in five years, which will be 12 quarters of school. And my major is computer science. I'll be a fifth year senior when I get back from this race in computer science. I'm an economics major at Stanford and I've been spending the last two years working on this vehicle Luminos and I also raced with the team in 2011. There are three classes that compete in the World Solar Challenge. The class that we competed in is the Challenger class and that is straightforward racing. You have one person in the car. You're trying to go as fast as you can. All the teams begin in Darwin, which is on the northern coast of Australia. And from there on, the teams are racing head to head to Adelaide, which is the finish line of the race. Darwin in Australia is a very special place and the lines of a lot of people on our team. It's in the subtropics, so it's hot, it's humid. There's a lot of mosquitoes and other bugs and on top of that there's crocodiles, plenty of dangerous poisonous things. We usually set up ourselves in a hostel. The majority of our time in Darwin is spent at a race track called Hidden Valley, focused on doing last minute preparations for the race itself. I'm Max Prazlin from the Stanford Solar Car Project. I'm an electrical engineer on the project and I've been working with the team for about two and a half years. I joined actually about exactly a year ago and just the fact that I'm here in Australia now is pretty crazy. In the World Solar Challenge, the teams that place in the top three will actually receive recognition and a big medal. So basically, the Gold, Silver and Bronze teams are kind of the top teams the next two years throughout the globe. For the last six or so races, there's been two teams that have traded back and forth winning the World Solar Challenge. The Dutch team, Nuon, and also the Japanese team Tokai. And then the University of Michigan is also another top team. They've consistently been in the top three. There's always naturally a little bit of a competition between Michigan and Stanford. We were focused on them. We wanted to beat them. They wanted to beat us. That's a good rivalry. Michigan is a fantastic team and Michigan provided all the incentive we needed to sort of pull those extra late nights. We were kind of in the dark with respect to Twente. We had gotten to know these guys and they're really funny people. Yeah, definitely one of the fastest teams in the whole race. Very good team master students. In the Netherlands, they take a year and a half off to do it. They build a beautiful car, race very fast. One of the cool things about our team is that we're completely student run and our university involvement is really there to support us, not to direct us. A lot of these other teams are run by professors. They're either completely or mostly grad student composed. And it was really cool for us to see how these other teams are run that were really a lot older than us, a lot more experienced. Right now we're at Darwin Showgrounds where they're staging the event scrutineering where all the teams that are competing in the race this year go through about four hours of regulation checks with the officials for the race. One of the first stations that our team goes through is a battery check station. At high noon when the sun is high above the sky our team will use a solar ray to charge those batteries at the end of the day and in the early morning when the sun is low in the sky we can still cruise the same speed using the extra energy stored in our battery pack. I'm curious to see what other teams have for their battery packs. Most teams keep them pretty under wraps. This was just a station to go through and put an orange string across the pack so that if we were to tamper with any cells it would be obvious that something had happened. It's just sort of a safety check that they have that teams are following the rules. Hopefully in the course of the race we'll never open the battery pack again and it will be on no problems. One of my main projects was building the battery pack mechanically. Max Praglund did the electronics and Rachel Fenichel did the code. You start the race with a full pack. You're fully charged in Darwin and you end the race with an empty pack. Some days later, so you don't discharge to zero every day and you don't recharge to full every day. My other role on the team as of recently has been working on our race strategy and part of that is having good models of the car so I've worked very carefully to identify how the car performs in different conditions and then use that information to decide how fast we drive the car. If you go faster you're actually burning quite a bit more. Sometimes it'll be better to go faster by one kilometer an hour over a long period of time rather than faster by 5 or 10 over a short period. It depends on what your strategy guys are saying you should do it depends on what you think the weather will be ahead and whether you have to outrun clouds, stuff like that. One of the more fun parts of scrutineering is the driver egress test where upon the driver must be seated inside the car with their seatbelt on and get out of the car and I believe it's 12 seconds. But the way it works is you get locked in the car and you have your harness on and your helmet on and the radio and they give you a countdown. Time starts and you have to get out all by yourself. A lot of things could go wrong it would require a driver to get out of the car immediately. Most obvious being some sort of a fire and either electronics or the battery systems which do happen. With Luminos it was pretty easy to get in and out of. Some folks actually have to transform from designers to race car drivers like Anna Olson. One of the roles that you played in Australia was that of driver and can you explain to everybody what is the experience like of driving Luminos? One of the most challenging parts about driving the solar car is that it's extremely boring. Your only job is to sit there and keep the car between two straight lines on the road. There's basically no air movement inside the car. You're basically sitting in a little black carbon fiber box. It's definitely unpleasant objectively speaking but at the same time you're driving a solar car across Australia. That part never gets old for me. Our organization has kind of a dual purpose between providing educational experience for the students on the project and making a really high performance vehicle. Should I redesign this? Should I do something new? It would be a little more educational for my members so really navigating the tradeoff between good race performance and doing things that are new is probably the toughest challenge. My name is Alex Tilson I'm a 1992 graduate of Stanford so I was at the very first meeting that the Stanford solar car project has ever had. It was freshman year. In 1989, no one had built a solar car before. It was the first drive we were doing in Australia. I was the first to take the car to Australia and the World Solar Challenge in November of 1993 where we were 13th I believe out of 40 that started roughly for speed record across Australia for 20 years much to our surprise. The teams that went subsequently didn't finish. I know at our company our entrepreneurial success I partially relate back to the solar car experiences. It taught me a lot as a leader taught me a lot as a manager taught me a lot as an entrepreneur taught me a lot as an engineer. The solar car team and technologies are usually ahead of their time in terms of looking at the next best generation of batteries, the best solar panels best motors and efficient converters, things like that. Most of my involvement with the solar car team was toward the end of when I was at Stanford. I had many friends that were part of that team throughout my time there and I recruited most of the people from the team when we started Tesla. It was a key thing in the beginning of Tesla. I think it matters more than most classes you can take. It's one of the things that even today at Tesla we look at on resumes in place at higher than perhaps higher than what classes they decided here and there. So the process of getting our solar car from basically a blank sheet of paper with no ideas yet to having a vehicle that can be ready to race across this drone outback takes our team about 18 months. It's a very quick cycle. We'll spend about three months doing preliminary design work. Once we get to the mid-fall we'll start doing some of the manufacturing work. The vast majority of the components of the vehicle we actually manufacture here on the Stanford campus for example the carbon fiber composites we ramp that up in the late fall going into the winter. Basically the entire vehicle's composite monocoque chassis and exterior shell is made out of carbon fiber. We have a lot of titanium components in the vehicle. We have very high efficiency solar cells on the top of our vehicle in the solar array. And our team usually spends about two or three months doing testing here in California for the most part. For example we'll spend a lot of time in the valley where there's a lot of open farmland where a team can do testing that's a lot more similar to the Australian outback. We've also done some wind tunnel testing in the past even not in North Carolina. Key word for that cycle is testing, testing, testing. We actually put the full length of the race on the car in test miles in the United States which is a challenge most teams haven't been able to accomplish. This year our team was very fortunate in that we had a couple hundred great sponsors that supported our team and all together the program this cycle had about $1.6 million worth of parts and cash that were donated to our program. Of that maybe $400,000 was cash and the rest were parts that were donated to our team. For example Panasonic was one of our big sponsors this year that provided battery cells for our vehicle. So the Stanford team assembled hundreds of our cells into various blocks. Those blocks were assembled into a battery pack and they did all of the integration of the cells complete with the battery management system. And this is an amazing effort considering these are young adults many of them not even officially graduated yet and being able to pull this off was really I think quite magical. One of the big sponsors was ST Microelectronics that provided a lot of the integrated circuits for our vehicle this cycle. These microprocessors are kind of the center of what our software team works on and this is a little circuit that we use on pretty much every circuit board on the car. The invisible software that just makes everything on the car work and have all the different elements on the car talk to each other. We've been sponsoring it for over six years now and we'll continue to support it because now we're very involved. It actually goes quite fast I accelerated I thought I scared the crowd by driving at them and they got the message get out of the way. It was great, no it was good fun but what I was fascinated by was how they do everything on this car from scratch it's an amazing achievement for undergraduates they have to still study and get their homework in as we all know on time and get their projects done at the end of the day it's also a lot of fun and I think that's what comes across they really enjoy it and very enthusiastic and that's it and like all semiconductor companies there's a method in our madness you know we're a European company we're in the middle of California and we've become famous with the next generation of engineers right you know catch them early as they say it's a fantastic project it's better than I expected I mean people have been telling me about it for years but now I've been up close and personal it's impressive for the summer our big deadline in the sand was to get the car in a boat seven weeks before we needed it in Australia usually our team will ocean ship our car because that's the most cost effective way this last year I tried to make a big effort to try to find a corporate sponsor that could support our team with air shipping but I had very little success for months on end until I got some inroads with Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic air shipping is something we always talked about doing but it's hard and Wesley manages all in the background to get this sponsorship it reinforces the opinion that he's magical Wesley was amazing at logistics how was the year? beautiful Greg was great for technical advice knowledge and they were just both fun people to be around they did a fantastic job so with our team we definitely have a lot of passion and strong personalities every time water drips out fortunately this year we had a very strongly knit group of students that were out in Australia by the time we got to the race we were really functioning as a well-oiled machine that on the car is still on? fortunately for us Stanford University provides cash support but we still operate on a pretty tight budget when we're in Australia we weren't dining out every night but no we're not starving and also this is partly because the team tries to put most of our money into racing you can live on P&J for a while the one large expense that our team members have to personally cover is a flight ticket to Australia and for many members of the team that's a barrier that prevents folks from being able to go to Australia to experience racing in the outback in addition to the solar car itself our team has a convoy vehicles that we use to support the race car so this year Volkswagen provided us with four vehicles to use and our team picked up those vehicles in Melbourne, Australia the first vehicle that we have in our convoy we call the Scout Car we provide weather data just ahead of our team and reporting it back to the rest of the convoy they'll also report if there's any kind of new road hazards we wouldn't expect Australia does have a lot of kangaroos and they're actually primarily nocturnal creatures so they'll kind of get attracted to this road surface at night when the road is warm and the weather is cooled down a bit the problem with this is that there's road trains these three or four trailer long semi-truck configurations what they have adopted is they'll call them rougards where it's just a steel grate in front of the truck they won't stop because they can't stop and they'll just run these kangaroos down it and it happens there's roadkill on the road and we have to navigate that the next day the next vehicle in the convoy is called the lead vehicle and this vehicle will run maybe 500 yards in front of the solar car itself and then just behind the solar car is the chase vehicle and the chase vehicle is usually kind of the headquarters of our race convoy the final vehicle that we have in our convoy is our trailer vehicle which we use to carry all of our tents all of our camping gear and also some of our race equipment as well all the teams today got a chance to race their cars around the Hidden Valley race track and the team's racing time on the race track is what the officials use to determine the grid order for this year's race well it's a little bit nerve-wracking to be the one doing the hot lap just because the whole team's kind of counting on you everyone's worked really hard to get us here the Sampertine did very well we came in with a 2 minute 7 second race time that was the third fastest in the challenge class so that means that we'll be placed third car at the start of the grid for this upcoming race the day before the race I felt ready and I know a number of other people on the team have also felt ready I've been doing solar car for four years and this is probably my last shot at it so today is race day it's a little surreal to be here we're all obviously very pumped up a lot of adrenaline flowing none of us have slept all night waking every hour in anticipation of the day we're just really excited it's going to be a great race and a wonderful way to see Australia we... hope to win I'm excited, our team's excited feeling good got a good night of sleep and we're ready for a long race you kind of start to reflect a little bit on 18 months of everything the sleepless nights the joy of something working bickering about what's the best design what's not the best design the agony and the ecstasy of it all so my parents have decided to come to be the, as they call it drive the chuck wagon for the team like my wife says we're chief cooks and bottle washers we're making sure that the team stays full we're the cookies they'll be making our food and just handling the food logistics for the whole trip the nice thing about that is it means the team doesn't have to worry about food they can take a big chunk of work off of the team and leave us to sleep and make sure the car goes really fast really excited it's been a long process and here we are the door was Thanksgiving two years ago was a piece of cardboard and he was designing it fun to see it go from the idea to this the other guy that came was named David Olson he was a fantastic asset to have because he knew Outback Weather really well I believe that at the present time we're looking at some bad weather towards the last day what we hope to be the last day of the race if we can get there and fast enough we should be able to avoid the worst of it and then if we don't go fast enough we could run into some bad weather near Adelaide so you can see your power drop to near zero with the cloud in front of the sun and we think that if there's enough sun that we should be able to have enough energy in our batteries to make it down to Adelaide but it's really a scary game to play when you don't know if you're going to make it to the very end I'll be driving the first shift which is exciting but it's probably one of the more complicated shifts just because you're in real city traffic the nice thing is the convoy knows what to do we're rehearsed at this, we've done this on the first day of the race the teams are released off the starting line every 30 seconds or every minute or so getting out of Darwin was quite an adventure and there were a lot of teams it was just very dense traffic a lot of passing, very chaotic over the course of the race there's 9 or 10 control points that teams hit the biggest cities on the Stewart Highway every few hundred miles there might be a city with a population of 30 as the teams come in their racing clock will stop for a period of 30 minutes so teams can buy food and water for the next day of racing refuel their escort vehicle this control point will do a little bit of work on the car that's a little bit superficial so things like checking for bugs on the array makes the tire pressure okay basically the thing is that you want to evaporatively cool the array and as they heat up then we start straining we use deionized water or de-mineralized water for things that we're not leaving residue on the array getting a little more power than expected Nuon which is a team from the Netherlands their car Nuna 7 has concentrators in it so these are magnifying devices and that gets them a lot of extra power it's legal you do get a lot more sunlight onto every cell Nuna and Twente are in front of us we passed Michigan a short while ago for Michigan so we have pretty good sun coverage right now there's a bit of clouds but based on our weather data the clouds should clear up pretty soon and hopefully we'll have clear skies between here and the next control point as the teams continue for the rest of the day of racing before they get to the end of the race day at 5pm each day they'll have to try to scout out a place to spend the night so what the team will do is quickly pull the vehicle to the side of the road and then often times what they'll do is they'll take their array of the solar panel set them up so they can point to the solar panel directly at the sun for the last final hour of the day finally being in the race was definitely exciting although that sort of wore off after the first hour and then it was just a struggle to keep wiping the sweat off your face but it was a good time we're fourth now currently and ahead of Michigan I got to pass Michigan I looked over in green at their car and as long as we're standing in front of Michigan we'll be happy for now is Michigan back behind? yes, Michigan is just down the road a little ways behind us we didn't say that, we missed it we set up the array stand picking a position where we're going to get the most sun that we can we need to rotate the back of the car closer to me what they can say is okay, I think that you should go up by this amount and that's kind of eyeballing it based on angles that we can see alright, that's pretty good but then after they say I think we should do this, they can actually check we have a telemetry system and so we're getting data from the car directly to a laptop I can see the numbers they can say, okay, we're getting five more watts than we had last time, so this is a good angle ready for food and then looking forward to the stars out in the outback that's one of the coolest parts about camping out here we wake up before the sunrise, we get the array stand out we push it upright and we point directly at the sun and then what people do is we adjust the angle of it back as the sun goes up still keeping it pointed directly at the sun it was nice to camp in front of Michigan for the night, I'll see how long that trend can hold but overall things aren't really going yesterday despite it being a very stressful and hot day we were happy how things turned out the car is doing really well so far are we getting the rear fairings guys? fairings are the way we make the car aerodynamic around the wheels so the fairings come down off of sort of the main body of the car and shroud the suspension the brakes and the wheel and the motor and so the fairings are something you need to be able to get on and off to change tires we took the fairings on and off a lot of time on it cut it our team makes a a large investment in ensuring that the people that go to Australia understand their roles and have a good sense of unity with their team members there's definitely other teams that may have a lot more drama so as much as we can we try to avoid any kind of conflicts we would have at the last minute when it comes down to actually racing across the outback it wasn't really until all the cars were out we really knew how our team would stack up against Michigan and the Dutch teams and the Japanese teams that often beaten us in years past this year the Stanford team had a couple of alumni from our project that were tagging along with our team most of which were from Google actually they were rooting our team along they were also doing some recruiting at the same time what SolarCar does do that's really good is it's just the absolute best training ground for new engineers to really get some experience under their belts before going off into the world the last few people who have joined the Google X well, self-driving teams mostly have been from the Michigan SolarCar team the Minnesota SolarCar team and the Stanford SolarCar team I guess I should say that SolarCar is about 95% of the reason why I got my job it's pretty hot, the car is feeling pretty good though it's pretty stable it feels good about how long were you driving and about how many? about 5 hours we're pretty happy with where we are right now if you'd said 2 years ago that we'd be here we probably would not have believed you yeah, we're excited to be top 5 so far, really happy with how the car is doing no major problems now not yet, you never know today I'll be the driver in the afternoon from Tannin Creek where we currently are down to just a little shy of T-Tree it looks like, I haven't seen the latest models but last I've heard we'd be pretty close to there tonight we're in the outback now and you can kind of tell so it's a little more sane driving you can run your own race now as opposed to having to jockey with other teams a whole bunch so it's a little more relaxed in that sense Jamie, did you have a hammer? yep so we're camping up for the night and getting ready to eat some steak how's this? Michigan's still in undetermined but few kilometers behind us so that's kind of fun to still be this close at that point and Twente we think is about 20 to 25 minutes ahead of us it's nice to be within 30 minutes of a podium at the moment we're going to have to have a lot of people out to make sure it doesn't it's going to want to tilt like this and hit the tail there you go famous outback recipe ready for flipping it's containing kangaroos I got the baby wallaby batch baby wallaby batch they're good they're mad tasty the food has been very good I definitely can't say I was expecting to eat this well in the middle of nowhere on this laptop I have a set of graphs and numbers that are reading live data off the car and the idea is that by looking at the live data off the car I can match that up to our predictions that we've made so within a few minutes of noticing that we have more power in our battery than we had originally planned I can look at our numbers see what speed we should go to kind of match our predictions the biggest city that our team hits over the course of the race is Alice Springs which is right in the center of Australia the Stanford team is well over halfway through the race now we've been cruising anywhere between 85, just over 85 kilometers an hour on a daily basis right now which is fast for our car, fast for a lot of teams my name is Peter Collins my duties as an observer is to observe the activities of the team and record anything that might be a little bit out of the abnormal and pass it on to the officials so since leaving Darwin I've been with three different teams it's good fun of course coming home with all the teams is a wonderful experience because you do meet some young people who are our future and I think it's rather exciting to see them at work oh you found some wood! got the Barbie going they're little you don't we're just trying to get them more like half size I cut the carrots and I got somebody to cut the broccoli we're having curry tonight I'm done our team is aware of some that have probably dropped out at this point in the race there's two Dutch teams then one Japanese team that are still ahead of our vehicle but in terms of the competition behind us we're pretty far ahead this one's got a few cuts but nothing troubling can I uncheck? everything has been going very well so far the car has not broken down we've been sticking within a few KPH we've directed speed from the first day we have plenty of battery pack there's a lot of good sun right now it looks like we're going to keep up a tailwind until we get towards the coast from there it's kind of questionable what will happen we're looking at a storm system kind of rolling in from the ocean when we arrive in Adelaide so looking forward to another day of driving really fast music we had really strong tailwinds going into Cuperpete so not all cars are built to handle these kind of a winds unfortunately one of the cars at University of Michigan crashed today going into a control stop unfortunately they're okay but it's unclear what their status is in terms of racing but that would be a pretty big upset they've been the fastest American team for about two decades we started the day 45 minutes behind 28 men are now 5 or 6 minutes behind them it's cool to be right up there neck and neck with another team it's pretty weird after 2600 kilometers to be right on someone's tail I think everyone is starting to get a bit tired of camping in the Outback I haven't taken a shower since the morning of the race which would be four mornings ago and we're soon coming up on some very fly heavy areas I'm not a fan of the flies tomorrow's going to hopefully be our last day of racing the next day we knew it was going to be cloudy but it was a question of how much cloudy we would have to deal with and when and where the rain might hit us this was a photo of us huddled around our laptops trying to decide what we were going to do on the last day of the race so our decision that night was that if we got any bit of sun in the morning we would try to catch Twente and that meant that we were going to throw all of our best practices for race strategy out the window and this was kind of a calculated gamble we knew that if we caught them it would be worth it and if we didn't catch them and ran out of energy we might be stuck on the side of the road good gamble makes it fun, makes it exciting makes it really freaking stressful on the last day so that last day waking up it was definitely exhilarating we figured they probably had more on the battery pack than we did but we wanted to keep pressure on them hoping they would make a mistake we know they were worried about us it was really fun to be in an active race that late in the game against the team we all respect so much we had a short drive from the place that we had camped the night before to Port Augusta we're at the last control stop right now the Solar Team Twente is in third place we're going to have to brave this terrible weather but our team was trying to get the last potential wattage out of our solar ray so we had our team propping our vehicle up to get a bit more sunlight to improve the power output of the solar panels hey Wesley what time do we leave again just so we know it's really going to be a race to Adelaide don't know if we have enough sun to get there don't know if they do if we got zero sun we surely won't make it to Adelaide it's about 200, 300 kilometers from here to save some energy it's a high stress time right now after 30 minutes we had to jump in our convoy vehicles and try to chase down the Dutch team just ahead of us so the rules of the race dictate that we must always be traveling at least about 35 miles an hour when we're on the road and for the last day we went about 35 the entire way the most stressful point in that drive from Port Augusta to Adelaide is when motorists started to cut out already meaning that it was very low in battery pack and we're coming up to the largest grade on that section of the track or the race course and we were at the bottom of it and it was raining very hard my vision was highly obscured by fog so I couldn't see very well but halfway up they realized uh oh we're not really going to make it pull out of the top of the hill I personally needed to use the facilities as well as wipe out the condend compensation inside the cockpit but once we got to the top it was literally downhill from there fortunately we only had to stop twice briefly unfortunately the Dutch team 20 ahead of us had a bit more energy and they were able to pull away from us on the final day of racing I feel really great we just finished with the car we became third we were pretty close with Stanford and they were constantly like 15 minutes behind us it was such a pleasure to race with them so I was really happy that we got a little bit of sun in those last 30 minutes or so they were able to drive us through the finish line so my first error was stopping apparently about 6 inches short of the line it was a really nice culminating experience getting fourth place last drive I was having a solar car to America's number one solar car team made it yeah got a little shaky at the end but trucked on through awesome like we're the first team to finish from Stanford and forever and we did it properly we didn't break down I'm going to take a nice long shower and get rid of this red honed back dust all on me and then I'm going to take it long now yeah so excited so so happy I was so nervous nail biter it was a nail biter feeling relieved fourth place best finish ever I think for Stanford so couldn't be much happier great great we're all at the finish line and a timing and we're very very happy the next car we expect to have here on the finish line will be the Stanford solar car project from the United States from here is the truth energy sciences tricks on the battery seals thank you very much I like this this pack it's nice not a speck of dust or anything on it congratulations it's a very nice pack thank you it's very good the team this year did very well we're very happy with the results and having the best finish in Stanford's history I was fabulous what they did the team had been in a 20 year Australia rut and we're thrilled that the team went and obliterated the 93 Stanford performance and beat Michigan really was the top all students team in the world had software to Wesley for heading it up and for everyone else for being a pivotal part of it as well there's also using an award that goes to teams that are recognized for their I guess spirit in the event itself the 2013 Bridgestone wealth center challenge the David Puchak spirit of the event award is presented to Snotfart sorry Stanford that's just an effort to recognize teams that doing something special to make the World Solar Challenge really an exciting and fun event for everyone involved and this award is yours as much as it is ours thank you I would easily rank the Stanford Solar Card Experience is my top experience I've had here at Stanford but there's still some lingering stress I can say from the last year and a half and I'm sure I've taken months if not years off my lifetime by the amount of stress that I've gone through one of the reasons that you can kind of justify to yourself putting so much time in it is because it's kind of something that society needs a little bit so beyond just the educational thing there's also a cool kind of pushing showing society what's possible you know maybe this much in energy to get from Darwin to Adelaide to start out almost 2,000 miles on a few bucks of energy if you were charging it off the grid so it's not a bad deal yeah it's not a bad deal after I got back from being in Australia I began my job search to find a full-time career and I just recently joined Google working on their self-driving car project what do you need? right so I'm graduating in June going up to Yosemite for a week to relax vacation go hiking and then I'm going to start working at Google X writing code as a full-time job this just isn't flat yeah I was working at Tesla the spring and summer leading up to the race so now I'm full-time at Tesla in the battery design engineering group there's no question that I would not have gotten my very first internship at Tesla without what I learned at solar car I certainly hope that the university continues to put resources behind this and also stay out of the way enough to provide a place that students can really have that freedom so they can push the boundaries, fail occasionally learn from the failures, make mistakes that was one of the instrumental parts of solar cars there was never a safety net to prevent you from making really bad mistakes and you learn amazingly quickly in an environment like that it's a little bittersweet to see it finally end but I'm glad I got to go out on a very high note like this and I have so much confidence in the people that are coming up we just had such a great group of young people join this year the team's in great hands can't wait to see what comes next that's what's really incredible about this experience to me is that you join as a you know wide-eyed undergrad with no concept of anything that you think would be useful to the car at all and then you know eventually you realize that at some point between Australia and where we are now the wand has been passed down and it's it's our turn to build a solar car