How racing solar cars in the Outback as a college student builds engineering career skills

In October 2023, Michigan Engineering's solar car team raced their 17th solar car, Astrum, across the Australian Outback as part of the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, finishing in 4th place after starting dead last due to electrical issues during their qualifying lap.
The global competition is a unique challenge that requires years of careful planning and engineering to make it successfully across the unforgiving landscape. Teams that choose to enter have the chance to compete at the highest level against college and university students across the world who bring their very best. But it is also an incredible experience for the University of Michigan undergraduate students to discover who they are as engineers, team members and people, and one that offers them extracurricular scenarios that can translate to multiple years of real world, industry experience when students begin looking for jobs to start their careers after graduation.
Read more about how the University of Michigan team performed during the 2023 race:
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Watch more videos about the Michigan Solar Car Team:
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Check out what the Michigan Solar Car team is up to:
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The University of Michigan College of Engineering is one of the world’s top engineering schools. Michigan Engineering is home to 14 highly-ranked departments, and its research budget is among the largest of any public university.
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[@spencer7985]

Awesome! 🙌

[@gracehsiahaberl7123]

Absolutely spectacular video, I am so proud of these University of Michigan students and love the remarks by Sam Haberl and Chris Gordon. They highlight the importance of experiential learning opportunities like those provided by the Solar Car Team and other student organizations. Love these project teams, I hope more of them are able to make it to the 30-year mark like the University of Michigan Solar Car Team. Go Blue!💙

[@gracehsiahaberl7123]

And way to go Marketing and Communications team at the University of Michigan College of Engineering! Absolutely love the Netflix Drive to Survive quality and feel to this video.

[@withjoe1880]

Minor correction. Actually racing the solar car doesn't build engineering skills. The engineering part is designing, building, testing, troubleshooting, repairing, monitoring, and deciding the strategy for the race. The race gets all the publicity, but the cooler part and the part that takes most of the time is the stuff which goes on behind the scenes and before the car even hits the road. Cool video and cool car though. Good luck.

[@MichiganEngineering]

Very good point! So much of what students learn happens in the years leading up to the race just as you described. The race provides excitement for sure, but also often presents many final lessons as things usually doesn't go perfectly to plan and teams need to repair parts that fail or tune parts that aren't performing as expected. A good showcase of that is this video we produced in 2015 about the legacy of the Michigan team and some of the lessons they learned over the years: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eaSVpYariZ5go5I