Tokai left Wauchope, NT at 08:00am and reached Kulgera, South Australia - 667 km south - at 16:02pm, stopping twice at the 30-minute control stops along the road. So – with 7.02 hours driving – they averaged at 95 kph.
The Dutch team Nuon's solar car, Nuna 6, departed at 08:08am and arrived at 16:37am – speed averaged 89 kph. This 6kph difference with Tokai opened a gap on the day of about 30 minutes between the two cars.
What's that in vacuum cleaners?
Since this race is about energy, let’s do some energy calculations. I will take this site as example – you can calculate power consumption based on weight and aeroshape.
A typical solar car weighs in at 230kg (150kg + 80kg driver) and has a CdA (a measure for aero drag) of 0.09.
Fill this in on that site and look at the resulting tables: 89 kph leads to a consumption of 1315 W. Nuna drove for a 7.30 hours, so total energy consumed on this 667km stretch is 1315 x 7.5 = 9.9 kWh.
As a point of reference, Nuna used the equivalent energy of six hours vacuum cleaning to travel 600km at normal commuting speed.
Tokai’s 95 kph with the standard specs represents a consumption of about 1550W. And since they drove for seven hours, their consumption amounts to 1550 x 7 = 10.9 kWh.
