SMARTT Challenge-Raleigh North Carolina
Posted in Production Logs on May 30th, 2008EnergyRushTV was invited to document the SMARTT Challenge (Students Making Advancements in Renewable Transportation Technology on the campus of North Carolina State University. We flew all day from the West Coast and when we got to the hotel the parking lot was full of electric cars. Just below our 2nd story room was a Porsche that was connected to an extension cord. When we arrived the next morning there were over a dozen cars and trucks that were all converted to electric by high school students! EnergyRushTV has been too many EV and PHEV events but we had never seen an event like this. We interviewed and documented these amazing cars and the students behind them. Behind this annual event are Dr. Pam Carpenter and Jennifer Whitley who have been promoting this event. This was not just a beauty contest but a competition related to design, range, autocross, trouble shooting, oral presentations, and web design. But there was also another dimension to this and that was a solar science fair competition. Hundreds of students working in teams build solar powered models that had to carry a payload. We had two cameras on this and we were running to keep up with the action.
The SMARRT Challenge is an annual event sponsored by Progress Energy and next year there will be a plug in hybrid for high school students. We loved this event and the people. As one southern gentleman looked at all these cars and trucks he was bemused and rhetorically asked us “if these high school students can do this how come the car companies can’t do it?”
