Germany's high-tech Wind Explorer makes a near-5000 km journey across Australia in 18 days -- on less than $15 worth of power
Two German adventurers have (literally) slipped quietly into Sydney concluding a 4800 km cross-country trip in a lightweight electric and wind-powered car.
Engineer Stefan Simmerer and television broadcaster Dirk Gion took 18 days to pilot the Wind Explorer from the southern WA town of Albany to Sydney. Along the way, they took in three new records. This is the first full crossing of a continent by a vehicle powered by wind. It's also the longest overall distance yet covered by an exclusively wind-powered land vehicle, and the car achieved the longest distance covered by such a vehicle in 36 hours.
The Wind Explorer was shipped together in just a few months with the help of German industrial chemicals giant Evonik. It looks like an aerodynamic billycart, riding on skinny bicycle-style wheels, outboard up front, inboard astern. In fact, it's something of a high-tech tour de force, albeit an esoteric one. The wheels and tyres were selected for low rolling resistance, and its aluminium frame is covered in Evonik-supplied Rohacell sandwich carbon fibre body panels. As a result, it keeps the weight down to just 200 kg, including its Li-ion battery pack.
But while it can be charged conventionally from the grid, the idea behind the Wind Explorer was to make the run with a carbon footprint as near zero as possible. The first pointer to how it does this pokes rudely from the car's posterior, in a pair of what look like those massive aftermarket exhausts you see on ageing WRXs and Evos.
In fact, they couldn't be further removed from it. For a start, they're made of lightweight bamboo. Taken from the body and screwed together like vacuum cleaner bits, they make up the six-metre telescopic mast for a portable wind-powered turbine generator. It takes about half an hour to put it all together. When wind conditions were appropriate, they used the turbine to recharge the 8 kW/h battery pack overnight. Also developed by Evonik, the battery pack is good for around 400 km on a charge. The experiment was useful for Evonik in endurance testing -- it was exposed to ambient temperatures of up to 60 degrees.
For those times when the winds are strong enough, the car even packs its own kite, operated from the passenger seat like one of those surfing kites. When conditions were right, it was pulling Simmerer and Gion along at up to 80 kph.
Leaving on January 26, the 800 km leg from Albany to the Nullarbor Plain was powered entirely by a mix of turbine- and grid-sourced electricity. With strong prevailing winds on the Nullarbor, Simmering and Gion were able to shift to kite power. January 31 saw the vehicle cover a whopping 493 km.
Predictably, the press release material declares the whole project a rousing success -- "pioneering spirit and German high-technology make a dream come true" etc. One important metric gives them reason to: the Wind Explorer carried the two men and at least some of their gear through WA, SA, Victoria and NSW on less than $15 worth of electricity.
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