Lightspeed champion?

It is fair to say that the solar car, although a neat demonstrator for photovoltaic technology, hasn’t had much of an impact on the wider automotive world.

That is perhaps partly because of the unstable-looking ‘rolling coffee table’ design — with its expanse of solar cells, spindly wheels, and cramped driver’s compartment — that has tended to dominate the field.

But now a group of UK students from Cambridge University’s Eco Racing team (CUER) is hoping to prove that a radically different design a step closer to the type of vehicle that might one day appeal to consumers can perform just as well as, if not better than, its less aesthetically pleasing forbears.

Dubbed Resolution — after the ship used by Captain Cook to circumnavigate Antarctica — the vehicle was recently flown to Australia, where it is due to compete in October’s World Solar Challenge, a gruelling four-day-long, 3,000km race across the Australian Outback from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south.