What do solar energy, Australia’s most prestigious engineering university, a legendary 1900-mile car race, and the potential revival of the Australian automotive industry all have in common?

They’re unified by the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Sunswift Racing team and the vision of its leader, Professor Richard Hopkins. 

Sunswift began with a dream—competing in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge—back in the early 1990s. The Bridgestone Challenge is a world-renowned race that spans the Australian Outback from Darwin to Adelaide, showcasing solar-powered, custom-built cars. 

Sunswift Racing team has been competing in the Challenge since 1996, and has grown from an extracurricular activity to becoming part of UNSW’s top-ranked engineering program.

As Hopkins elaborates, “Sunswift Racing is a university initiative, developed to educate the next generation of brilliant engineers. The team is made up of 45 undergraduate students across multiple engineering disciplines.”

Since its inception, the Sunswift Racing team has designed and built 6 solar-powered hybrid vehicles, drawing over 20 major sponsorships, including IBM, Audi, 3M, Google, and McConaghy Boats. Their most recent vehicle, the VIolet, ranked 2nd in the 2019 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge and set a new Guinness World Record for Lowest Energy Consumption in 2018.

And the software that’s been central to their success in the Outback and beyond is Altium Designer.

Designing Cars to Withstand the Ultimate Challenge

The VIolet was the first four-seat/four-door cruiser designed by Team Sunswift; the mostly solar powered sedan features 318 monocrystalline silicon cells and can reach speeds of up to 87 miles per hour. Hopkins has helped steer the team to victory after VIolet suffered a setback at the 2017 Challenge. 

Before joining the faculty at UNSW in 2018, Hopkins spent decades working for Formula One; his extensive experience designing winning racing cars, along with Altium Designer, has given the team an inside advantage over the competition.

As Sunswift Racing team member Vaughn Jubb Buckley explains, “I believe Sunswift has always used Altium, but having used other PCB design software myself, I can attest to Altium’s superiority. Everything from the layout of the user interface and the integration of supplier information to the syncing of changes between schematics and PCBs dramatically improves productivity.”

“Inclusion of footprints/symbols in the part search also helps us increase productivity, as less time is spent developing them ourselves. The 3D viewer is essential in minimizing errors and also allows confirmation of component footprints and checking of physical compatibility with PCBs and enclosures,” Buckley adds.

The team was designing their seventh car when Covid-19 caught the world by surprise in early 2020, resulting in the cancellation of the 2021 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge.

Designs on the Future

This could have sidelined Sunswift, but instead it has given Team Sunswift a unique opportunity to visit schools all over Australia with VIolet, including in the most remote parts of the continent, showcasing the potential of STEM education at every pit stop. 

“Going to these remote locations with a traveling roadshow really inspires students; we’ve gotten a lot of support from our sponsors as well as the Australian government for these outreach efforts,” Hopkins adds.

For the university, Sunswift has become more than just a racing team—for a quarter of a century, it’s been a direct route to rewarding careers for its many team members, in Australia and abroad. To help further support their students, UNSW is transitioning Sunswift into a full-fledged institute, encompassing racing, technology, and automotive development. 

One of the aspirations of the Sunswift institute is the development of perpetual-energy vehicles. The idea came to Hopkins after his involvement with the 2019 Challenge across the Australian Outback.

The Outback is an expansive and desolate area, offering much in the form of solar power but little in the way of charging stations. “There’s still anxiety about using pure electric vehicles, especially in places like the Outback where setting up charging stations has always been a major challenge.”

The Institute will give Hopkins and his team a unique opportunity to work on this exciting new technology, with the goal of ultimately reviving the Australian automotive industry, which collapsed in 2018.