Welcome!

Welcome to the University of Texas Solar Vehicles Team (UTSVT) web site! Here, you will find information about our latest developments, outreach events, and learn more about solar car "rayces!" At over 50 members strong, the team is currently hard at work building its new car for the North American Solar Challenge 2008, the Samsung Solorean.

Please check out our first newsletter of the Spring 2008 semester, available here!

UTSVT Summer 2008: Week 2

School may be out of session, but UTSVT is continuing to push full steam ahead in building the Samsung Solorean. In the three weeks since the last day of finals, team members made significant progress in translating schematics and drawings to a real-life car. While the car's construction is still in progress, much testing and debugging is taking place simultaneously to facilitate final integration and testing.

Crew List

The North American Solar Challenge 2008 crew consists of:

  • Professor Gary Hallock, faculty advisor
  • Dinesh Antony
  • Cyrus Bavarian
  • Ho Cheung
  • Hunter Estes
  • Benton Greene, driver
  • Jerome Powell, UT alumnus, driver
  • Dev Saha
  • Erica Thorson
  • Steven Yang
  • Chak Man "Sunny" Yeung, driver

In addition to the crew attending NASC 2008, several loyal members are contributing some of their free time in this final phase of construction:

  • Johnathan Bush
  • Thomas Deconinck, Ph. D student
  • Fred Engelkemeir
  • Geoff Grimes, UT alumnus
  • Charles Lee, Ph. D student
  • Chris Such
  • Dave Tuttle, Ph. D student
  • Stephen Yang

    • UTSVT thanks its corporate partners who make the construction of the Samsung Solorean possible, as well as its loyal members for their many hours of service and commitment to this project.

    Electrical Work

    After a significant amount of debugging and testing, the National Instruments CompactRIO is now a fully-functional battery management system!

    Upper body successful!

    Even during finals season, several members made time in their schedule for laying up the upper body. Last week, the team unwrapped the upper body and pulled it out of the mold:

    The upper portion of the body weighed a mere 50 lbs. and can be carried by one person. This was a significant improvement from Solar Steer at over 200 lbs.!

    Keep in touch!

    As you may have noticed on the front page, UTSVT is now on Twitter! Via this method, you can be as informed of new developments as if you were in the room with the members!