Lighting the way with solar-powered cars

Nothing much happens in the Australian outback town of Coober Pedy; a place so inhospitable that most of its population lives beneath the ground in converted opal mines.

But later this year its citizens will step blinking into the daylight as a bizarre-looking convoy of vehicles, powered purely by energy from the sun, sweeps at high speed along its dusty main road.

That’s because Coober Pedy is one of the very few towns along the route of the 2009 World Solar Challenge, a gruelling 1,689-mile race from Darwin to Adelaide along the infamous Stewart Highway — a interminably long and straight stretch of road bedevilled by sand storms, bush fires and blistering heat.

It won’t be the first time solar cars have travelled this way. The competition has been running every couple of years since 1987.

But while the conditions still provide a stern test for the engineers involved, it is fair to say that the esoteric vehicles are up to the challenge. Indeed, in the 2007 race competitors regularly struggled to stay below the 110km/h South Australian speed limit.