(gentle music) - This is a program that, over the course of the school year, builds a solar powered electric car.

- Students build a car that runs literally just off of sunshine.

The races we participate in, all the energy the car uses comes from the sun.

- In the summer, we race it against a bunch of other colleges that have also created these solar cars and see who wins.

(chuckles) - This year, we're going to Bowling Green, Kentucky.

There's a track by the Corvette Museum.

It's about three and a half mile long road track, and you just do laps on that for eight hours a day for three days in a row.

And the team that gets the most laps at the end of the third day wins.

So it's a very long endurance event.

- And then every other year, there's a second race that takes place, a road race that goes cross country, where your solar car is driving, like, on actual roads with actual cars, and it's whoever finishes the race, because a lot of cars do, like, break down so severely that, like, sometimes they can't finish it.

This past summer, we had a road race, and it was from Nashville all the way to Wyoming.

So, quite the trek.

(laughs) - There's no air conditioning or anything like that in the car, so it gets roughly 20 degrees hotter than outside in the car.

But it's a lot of fun.

I've never driven anything that drives anything like driving a solar car.

They're incredibly light.

They drive the same speed as a regular vehicle, so it's kind of, it's a weird feeling to come from a regular sized car to go down to something really small and really light.

- It's a high tech vehicle, it's made out of carbon fiber, high tech aluminum, it's covered with solar cells, and it's all built by the students.

- When I'm able to, like, create something, build something tangible, and then have it push our team across the country, is just incredible and super rewarding.

- We make our solar cars by designing them kind of very basically in CAD software, and then we'll do tests on the aerodynamics of them.

We're gonna try and make our cars more aerodynamic than the last every time.

And then we'll move into where we make our patterns and our molds for the actual body.

- And you kind of build the body out of, like, carbon fiber, epoxy, foam, and then kind of build it up from there.

We do the top and the bottom separately, and then when it comes time to actually drive it, you kind of lift the top on.

- And then hopefully we put about 1,000 miles on the car before we go to the track race so that we know we've got all of our problems ironed out, and we know how the car is going to perform.

- Anybody can join.

I got involved when I was a freshman.

You also don't have to be any particular major.

We have all kinds of majors.

- We are one of the very few teams that don't have an engineering department.

We will start having one next year.

That's the first year of ISUs.

But I think that a lot of the backgrounds that everybody comes from makes it a lot easier for our team to innovate on our ideas, because we're not all coming from the same background or the same knowledge of everything.

I mean, we've got people from wildly different education tracks, and they're all coming in here, bringing their knowledge to us.

- I'm a physics major.

We have, like, a game design major, engineering, technology.

It is very interdisciplinary.

We welcome everybody.

- It's from any department.

We've had, you know, music, chemistry majors, technology department, physics.

There's no restriction at all.

- When we're going out there, especially at the track race, we actually ended up beating Michigan and Stanford and U of I. U of I was the most rewarding.

(laughs) It's kind of a David versus Goliath kind of feeling.

- The track race, we beat five teams from the big 10, MIT, Stanford, CalSol, quite a few other, you know, really big name schools.

The vast majority of 'em have engineering departments.

We're only one of two or three teams that do not.

- It's a pretty feel good moment when you kind of notice how well how our team stacks up versus against some of these larger teams.

It's a very fun atmosphere.

We have a lot of good times.

- It's an amazing experience.

These kids, they build a car from scratch by themselves and then race it across the country.

You're not gonna get experiences like this.

It's really unique.

It's a tremendous amount of work, but, you know, I think it's something they really feel like they've got a sense of accomplishment.

So it's just a really positive experience.

And usually, once they go to one race, they're just totally hooked.

- It is something that's really unique, kind of niche in a way, but it's really cool.

Like, you're getting a lot of experience that you can then go on and apply, like, later in your career.

And also, like, if you like building things, wanna meet some cool people, like, hey, (laughs) it's a great place.

- I would say that this is the kind of thing that you will look back on for the rest of your life as one of the most fun things you've ever done in your life, one of the most rewarding experiences, and something, you will very fondly remember solar car, despite all of the long nights and despite a lot of the hard work that you have to do, and the missing out on a lot of certain things, 'cause you're spending time in the shop, building the car.

It's very easily my favorite part of my college experience.