Having been on three solar car races and driven hundreds of hours testing solar cars, I was dissatisfied with our conventional way of collecting data, interpreting data, and simulating future designs. I decided to teach myself Python and recruit a diverse team of students with backgrounds in electrical, software, and mechanical engineering so that our strategy team could understand the major disciplines our solar car team operates in. I taught them the important solar car concepts I had learned that I knew they would never learn in the classroom and laid out the major problems for them to solve.

By explaining concepts like rolling resistance, solar irradiance, and crosswind sailing the strategy team took my knowledge and ran with it. They are currently developing a genetic algorithm that optimizes the solar car’s drive characteristics and predicts energy use throughout a race given the weather, traffic information, and many other variables.