1,550 miles.
On sunlight.
Carrera is Rice's solar race car — a single-seat carbon-fibre catamaran built by students to cross the country on roughly the power a hair dryer draws.
catamaran monocoque
Who backs us
Become a partner
The car is the excuse.
The engineers are the point.
A solar car is one of the few undergraduate projects that forces electrical and mechanical engineering to actually meet. The battery pack has to fit a chassis someone else laid up. The motor controller has to survive a road someone else has to drive. Nothing works unless both halves talk.
We build that friction on purpose, and we pair it with a business team that treats fundraising, logistics and sponsor relations as engineering problems of their own. Students leave here having shipped something real — on a deadline, in front of judges, against forty other schools.
Mechanical
Composite layup for the catamaran monocoque, suspension and steering geometry, braking, and the aeroshell that has to stay under 5.8 m long and still cheat the wind.
Electrical
A 5.25 kWh pack with its own protection system, maximum power point trackers feeding six square metres of cells, motor control, and the telemetry that tells strategy how much sun we're actually banking.
Business & Operations
Funding the programme, running the chase crew and the race-day logistics, and getting a trailer, a car and fifteen students to a start line a thousand miles away.
Formula Sun Grand Prix & the American Solar Challenge
Both events are run by the Innovators Educational Foundation. Formula Sun is three days and twenty-four hours of wheel-to-wheel track racing — and the gate you have to pass through to start the cross-country event. The American Solar Challenge then sends the cars that survive on a multi-day, roughly 1,550-mile run between cities, scored on distance covered under the sun.
- Our class
- SOV — single driver
- Field
- 40+ schools, four countries
- Track format
- 3 days · 8 hours a day · most laps
- Road format
- 8 days · 4 stages · checkpoints
Put your name on the array
Building a solar car takes cells, carbon, machine time and a trailer full of people. If your company wants its logo somewhere genuinely hard to earn, talk to us.