TU Eindhoven students present off-road solar car Stella Terra

The student team Solar Team Eindhoven has developed its first off-road solar car. The car could drive 630 kilometers on a sunny day. The students say they designed ‘almost everything’ about the car themselves, to make it strong enough for off-road driving.

The Stella Terra is a four-door sedan with a sloping roofline that is made for use on paved roads and unpaved terrain. The car has solar panels on the roof that should allow the car to drive without charging stations, just like Stella cars from previous Solar Team Eindhoven teams. The student team talks about the world’s first off-road solar car.

The team says they had to develop ‘almost everything’ about the Stella Terra themselves, to make it resistant to the harsh conditions of off-roading, while also keeping the parts light and efficient enough to make a solar car possible. The suspension and solar panel inverters, among other things, were designed by the students themselves. The team previously said that the solar panels should also provide enough energy to ‘live on’, such as cooking and charging devices such as phones and cameras.

Stella Terra weighs 1200kg and has a top speed of 145 kilometers per hour. Technical details such as the size of the battery or the type of solar cells are not yet known. The team wants to test the solar car in Morocco in October, where the Stella Terra ‘drives almost a thousand kilometers through different landscapes and ends in the Sahara, all on the energy of the sun’. Solar Team Eindhoven builds a solar car every two years; the previous one was a solar camper.

The Stella Terra. Source: STE/Bart van Overbeeke