#umsolar

Noah Evile, Race Mechanical Engineer, readies the team's competition car the morning of the team's third day during the Bridgestone World Solar Car Challenge in Australia on October 14, 2019.

The Michigan Solar Car Team celebrates second place in the 2017 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, their best ever finish.

Read the recap of the full race here. 

The University of Michigan Solar Car Team unveiled their latest car, Aurum, on July 17, 2015 at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn MI. Aurum is the team's 13th generation solar car and the team will race it in the 2015 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia.

Photo: Evan Dougherty, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing

A Few Words From Our Logistics Guru

In the wake of the current shipping conundrum, the team has shown incredible grit and determination to make sure Quantum gets to Abu Dhabi in time for the race. It has been an exercise in logistical mastery, to say the least. At the heart of it all has been Aaron Frantz. We asked him to explain what he's been doing and what this has been like for him. 

"This was NOT what my vacation was expected to look like. Once we got the first ship "confirmed", I was scheduled to hand the rest of the Abu Dhabi logistics off to one of my rising Ops members as a hands-on experience before they had to deal with the "more difficult" Australian logistics later on. This quickly escalated to more than a training project, and I asked to trade my rising colleague for an unrelated-but-important domestic shipping project.

What Operations and Logistics of this caliber involves from my chair is being able to handle information being thrown at you from multiple continents and making decisive decisions based on that data. Our freight forwarder is doing yeoman's work wrangling airlines and trucks for us - late nights, weekends, Christmas, etc... Arnold and Jeff pulled the "straight from the script of a RomCom" stunt of driving, on Christmas, to New York to save the day. It looks like I have my finger on every pulse, but being the information clearinghouse and human Rolodex is just my contribution to the very large team making this work (and again, we can't say it worked until the car is wheels down in Abu Dhabi)."

Aaron Frantz

SCT Operations Lead

Basically, I spend the summer in Ann Arbor locked in the Wilson Center for days on end (although I do have to pay for somewhere else to "live").  And in July, I spend a week crammed in a car with a bunch of people I don't know (yet), driving 1200 miles chasing after a little maize and blue car, all the while madly scrambling to figure out why the hell we just lost 10% SOC. 

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