Given how thick the iMac is once you move beyond the edges, there clearly is room to fit a slot-load optical drive. If that’s not a convenient location, well neither is the place where all of the iMac’s other ports are located, and you’ll use them far more than you do a DVD drive. If that doesn’t appeal to Apple’s industrial design team, the company should include one of its external SuperDrives for free. Jobs knows the company can well afford this small generosity.After a stellar start to the World Solar Challenge, the fancied Nuon team from Delft has had to cop a ten minute penalty for breaking speed limits, while Japan's Tokai University entrant has been given a more serious 30 minute penalty.The penalties will probably put Solar Team Twente (also from The Netherlands) in the lead at least for a while since it, along with Nuon and Tokai were the overnight front-runners. Nuon was the first to arrive at the Dunmarra control point after Day one, at 4:26pm, followed by Twente and Tokai.With all cars obliged to take a 30 minute stop at the control point, and with racing ending at 5pm, that gave the three vehicles a strong overnight position. They were followed by the teams fielded by Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Solar Team Eindhoven, and Australia's Team Arrow in 7th spot.
Eindhoven's position is a considerable achievement since it puts a Cruiser-class car among the designed-for-speed Challenger cars.By The Register's reckoning, Nuon and Twente will retain their position out in front of the pack, with Tokai likely to find itself having to fend off the Michigan and Stanford entries before Day 2 is complete.The World Solar Challenge says Nuon was penalised for breaking the speed limit. Tokai's penalty (which mean its Tenant Creek control stop was doubled in time from 30 minutes to 60 minutes) as imposed to punish the entry for “the behaviour of its media car”.The field is also starting to thin out: as well as the rollover which put paid to the Cambridge University entry, Japan's Hachinohe Institute of Technology was unable to pass pre-start scrutineering, and since the start, the event is recording New Zealand's HybridAuto, South Korea's KUST entry and the ITS team from Indonesia as being trailered.Trailered vehicles are, however, still competing: having been unable to stay with the pack, they're brought forward to the next checkpoint. At the end of the race they will be assessed solely on distance traveled under solar power.
World Solar Challenge The World Solar Challenge kicks off today, with 36 solely-solar-powered cars about to attempt a 3,000km journey across Australia from the northern city of Darwin to Adelaide in the south.The Reg is following the race – and making some odd side trips you'll learn about soon – but with the cars on the starting line we felt it prudent to offer a look at the kind of cars making the trip.The race is run in three classes, all of which must be street-legal inasmuch as they possess brakes, indicator lights and other niceties that let them run on public roads. The Challenger class is for the out and out speed merchants intent on line honours. Most entrants in this class are low wedges of solar panels broken only by a dome so the driver can see. This year we've spotted two dominant configurations in the class. Here's one of them: a 'dome on the side' rig.We chatted with The JU Team and they assured us that despite the driver and motor residing on the right-hand side of the car, it is balanced perfectly. Steering can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of things.
The team is very popular around pit lane, where the smell of burning photons hangs heavy, because it is sponsored by a Swedish energy drink company that sent two pallets of its product to Darwin. By air freight. Half the competition is hopped up on the stuff, or gratefully using a slab of it to weight something down.But we digress. If you check out the Challenger class you'll also see what we'll call “bubble in the middle” designs like this one below from Team Arrow.A variant on the bubble in the middle design is this no-bubble setup from the UMP Solar Team out of the University Malaysia Pahang. The team jokes that its car is a convertible, but is serious with its intention to offer the driver a better experience by letting them out into a cooling flow of air. It may not look elegant but it's a solution to the real problem of driver discomfort: drivers have a nasty time of it in these solar cars.Let's check out the Cruiser class next. In this class speed is important, but entrants are also judged on how closely they resemble conventional cars in appearance and performance. Points are therefore on offer for items like car radios and luggage compartments capable of brining home a week's worth of groceries.
The car below, Solar Team Eindhoven's “Stella”, wowed racegoers yesterday by not only coming second overall in the time trial but doing so while packing four seats, a USB charger and a two-speaker music system. The team plans to run with four people aboard for some of the trip to Adelaide.Yes, it looks a little crude compared to the sleek entries above, but Hochinoe's team comprises just six people. Other teams have 20 or more people on board, and that's just the folks who made the trip.In any case, under the skin of almost every car there's crude hacks galore. Here's a shot of some ballast from a fancied entry that's typical of what's going on away from the public eye.And now to conclude, a picture of a truck that we bring you in order to fulfil our sub-heading's promise of naming the Snidely Whiplash of this wacky solar race. The truck belongs to Team Michigan, whose name was spat out along pit lane as being prone to covering its car if rival team members walk past. Michigan is apparently also unwilling to lend tools, a crime against solar camaraderie.
One can understand their secrecy: the team has come third in the last three World Solar Challenges, is tired of lower rungs of the podium and desperately wants to win this time around.We should also mention that the team is impressive inasmuch as students from across its titular university get involved: the truck was shipped to Australia thanks to sponsors wooed by marketing and PR students.Allow us one last photo: that of Vulture South's Simon Sharwood cuddling a crocodile. You can't go to Darwin without a crocodile encounter. Simon met this one in a local supermarket where he was stocking up on supplies for the trip south.World Solar Challenge Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), Britain's sole entrant in the trans-continental World Solar Challenge starting tomorrow in Australia, has withdrawn its “Resolution” vehicle from the race.
CUER entered the race with an innovative design featuring tilting solar panels, the better to catch the maximum amount of solar energy throughout the course of a day on the road between the challenge's starting line in Darwin and the Adelaide checkered flag. In between the two cities lies 3,000 km of the Stuart Highway and a lot of sunshine.CUER's design attracted knowing glances from Professor John Storey, the event's Chief Scientist, who described it to The Reg as “a daring torpedo shape”. Sadly that shape wasn't optimally stable: the team crashed during final shakedown cruises October 2nd with Resolution suffering the damage depicted below.Resolution did not appear at today's time trials to determine grid positions for tomorrow's start, but The Reg understands that World Solar Challenge officials had given CUER every chance to ready the vehicle for the 3,000km journey to Adelaide.
Sadly, the CUER team today came to realise it could not ready Resolution in time, because tests conducted after crash repairs had concluded “revealed new dynamic instabilities, which we have not been able to fix in the time we have left before the race.”While the vehicle was operable, the team's statement says “... we have not been able reassure ourselves of the safety of our solar drivers.”The team member to whom The Reg spoke was understandably upset, and declined to comment other than to point us to the statement we've linked to above.The statement also say that while Resolution has not made it to the starting line, the CUER team feels their efforts have been well and truly worthwhile.“There are many positives to be taken from the event this year,” the statement says, before listing the following achievements:“First and foremost, our engineers have ensured that our drivers have been safe at all times, with the car’s crash structure performing as designed in the event of an accident. Secondly, Resolution produced its best ever results while testing in Australia, indicating that CUER would have been on target to be competitive. Additionally, we have developed several new and innovative technologies over this design cycle: the tracking plate, flexible fairings, and concentrator systems – all of which will stand CUER in good stead for future competitions. And finally: Resolution has been an inspiration – to us; to the many members of the public who have been able to see her displayed; and to the next generation of engineers.”
Professor John Storey, the event's Chief Scientist, told The Reg the USA's University of Michigan, Japan's Tokai University, Italy's Onda Solare and Sweden's Jönköping University as teams to watch. Yet None featured prominently in the one-lap time trial conducted at Darwin's Hidden Valley raceway, a venue also used for more conventional motor sports, the time trial sees each competitor complete a flying lap of the 2.4km track.Australian Team Arrow was the provisional winner of the event, having zipped around the track in 2:00.1 minutes. The result “came as a surprise” according to team members from the Queensland-based outfit, as Australia's “sunshine state” has not entered the Challenge since 1999. A mixture of students, hobbyists and veterans of that 1999 effort have created a new car in the Challenger class, the toughest level of competitionPit lane at Hidden Valley was full of talk about some cars being set up as track racers, rather than being readied for the 3000km haul to Adelaide. Team Arrow wasn't the subject of a lot of such chatter, or indeed much chatter at all given its dark horse status. The team is confident it will make the distance.
Solar Team Eindhoven's entry Stella turned plenty of heads by finishing second in a provisional 02:05.01, a remarkable feat given it competes in the more lowly-specced Cruiser class. Cruisers are permitted two engines, which helped to propel the vehicle to 135 km/h down Hidden Valley's straight. Team representatives said the extra engine and extra weight needed to make a four-seater helps by improving cornering and down force.The weight's not all from ballast – plenty of cars have bags of dirt in odd places – but instead comes from features like the four seats, a music system with line-in and a USB charger. Already street-legal in the Netherlands, the team told The Reg it expects to do a weekly shopping run when it returns home.Team representatives also said their calculations suggest that even in The Netherlands' wan northern European light, only in the months of December and January would it need power from the grid to charge its batteries. Averaged over a year, we were told, the car would collect enough energy to satisfy an average family's motoring needs with some electricity left over to feed into the grid. Yes, the new XPS 11 is a notebook with a keyboard hinged to fold right back against the rear of the screen housing, just like the Lenovo machine’s does.
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