ETH students present new solar car for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge

(CONNECT) The aCentauri Solar Racing student project at ETH aims to challenge the world leaders in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge 2025 with a new solar car. The debut vehicle Aletsch from aCentauri had already successfully completed the 3000-kilometer race route across Australia in 2023. The team then “scrutinised every team structure, every component, every design and every decision”, aCentauri explains in a press release. In just one and a half years, the new Silvretta solar car was born.

“With Silvretta, we have focused even more consciously on the interplay between aerodynamics and solar power,” Leander Hoffmann, Head of the Aerodynamics Team at aCentauri, is quoted as saying in the press release. “Using the calculated air resistance, the calculated solar power, the engine characteristics and the race parameters, we were able to determine the predicted race time for various vehicle designs and select the best design.” The car has a chassis milled from high-strength aluminum and was mainly made from carbon and glass-fiber reinforced composites.

The electricity to drive the radial flux wheel hub motor is generated by a 6 square meter solar cell surface. The individual solar cells achieve an efficiency of 24 percent. With this and “an air resistance that corresponds to that of a conventional exterior mirror on a standard vehicle”, Silvretta “sets new standards in terms of efficiency and performance”, writes aCentauri. ce/hs