Divyank Kushagra Bansal 
Last month, student team Solar Team Eindhoven from the Eindhoven University of Technology pulled the wraps off their all-new EV creation, the Stella Terra, claimed to be the world’s first off-road capable EV powered purely by solar energy. With its roof-mounted solar panels, the road-legal Stella Terra weighs just 1,200kg, has a top speed of 145km/h and offers a claimed driving range of 630-710km (on a sunny day).
While Solar Team Eindhoven carried out extensive tests of its creation in the Netherlands, due to limited landscape variety, the team could not test the car’s off-road capability to the desired standards. Therefore, the student team announced that it will take the Stella Terra on a thousand-kilometre journey from northern Morocco to the Sahara desert this month, during which the EV will drive through various challenging landscapes, ranging from dry riverbeds and forest areas to steep mountain trails and loose desert sand, with no external propulsion aids.
The team recently concluded this 1,000km test and came back with rather astonishing results. With an estimated off-road driving range of 550km, team manager Wisse Bos claimed the ‘Stella Terra turned out to use 30% less energy than expected’.
Of course, the development of the EV was anything but easy for Solar Team Eindhoven. To make the car light and efficient but also robust enough to tackle off-road conditions was indeed a tall order, due to which, ‘we had to design almost everything for Stella Terra ourselves, from the suspension to the inverters for the solar panels’, said Wisse Bos.
With its Stella family of solar vehicles, the four-time World Solar Challenge-winning team wants to demonstrate that transition to clean and sustainable energy is possible and offers reasons for optimism, without relying on an elaborate charging infrastructure.
