630 miles, zero gas, and a car that breaks in your own parking lot

On July 19, dozens of high school teams from around the country will line up in Fort Worth, Texas, to start a five-day road race covering 630 miles to Fort Stockton. The vehicles look nothing like a normal car. Most are flat, wide, and low, with a single driver crammed under a solar panel. Some look like space probes that escaped the clean room. And the only fuel they can use is sunlight.

The Solar Car Challenge marks its 30th anniversary this year, growing from a single frustrated teacher's experiment into a nationwide program that has engaged more than 85,000 students across 39 states and several countries, including Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, and Singapore. Over 260 active high school solar projects exist today. See also: unlikely analog revivals.

The race that is not about the car

Founder Lehman Marks, a Texas educator, started the program in 1993. In the late 80s and early 90s, he had a group of disengaged kids who were not responding to textbooks. A friend at the University of North Texas invited him to see a collegiate solar car competition, and the reaction was immediate.

"We went up there and the kids were just mesmerized by the intricacy of the solar project," Marks told The Verge. "And all the way back from Desmond to Dallas, they kept yelling, 'Doc, won't you please let us build a solar car?'"

He relented, but quickly realized high school students could not compete fairly against university teams because of gaps in technical expertise and money. So he built a dedicated high school competition instead. The educational program kicked off in 1993, and the first national race ran in 1995.

Three categories, one new cruiser division

This year's event introduces a new division: cruiser. Teams must build four-seater vehicles with solar arrays integrated directly into the car's body. The decision came from years of people asking whether solar cars would ever look like actual automobiles rather than flat aerodynamic pods with a driver squeezed underneath, as explored in a DeepMind framework on conceptual rigor.

"People would say, 'Oh, this is really neat, but it's not reality,'" Marks said. "Now we can show them what it could be. And I think that's a step up."

The race also includes classic, advanced, and electric-solar power categories, the latter where teams race electric vehicles charged from stationary solar power stations. The winner is the team that accumulates the most driven miles over the five-day trek, which passes through Palestine, Round Rock, Fredericksburg, and San Angelo before finishing in Fort Stockton. Town residents line the route to cheer each time a team passes through, according to Marks. For context on what makes autonomous tasks this complex, see a multi-agent system that taught itself to revise.

Building the workforce, not the car

Blake Wood, a 17-year-old rising senior from Fort Worth Country Day high school, is one of the captains of Old Rip Racing, an independent team drawing members from three different schools. He sees that diversity as the team's biggest strength, letting students who would otherwise never meet collaborate on a shared engineering project.

Wood says the team started planning about a year before the competition, beginning with paper sketches and studying successful cars from previous years in the Classic Division. As the project progressed, they learned computer-aided design (CAD) tools to turn hand-drawn concepts into engineering models. The process was iterative and messy.

"I think our vehicle, it looks really nice to me," Wood told The Verge. "It's unfortunate. So we don't really get to see it that often all put together, and it feels like we're always fixing something or making something and then putting something back on."

Marks is direct about the point of the exercise. "People say, 'Well, are you trying to build a better solar car?' Between you and me, I'm not," he said. "I'm trying to build a student who is capable, who learns about commitment, dedication to a project, to learn about teamwork, to learn about engineering and battery technology. I'm trying to build a workforce and trying to build engineers." The same principle applies in AI, where a learning loop changes the autonomous game.

Solar transportation beyond the classroom

While battery-electric vehicles have gone mainstream, solar cars remain experimental. Several startups that chased the mass-market solar car dream have either pivoted or gone bankrupt. Aptera, one of the few still pursuing the goal, has yet to reach production.

Wood remains optimistic. "We're making progress," he said. "I mean, we have a whole lot of high school students making them, and I think with the right equipment and a little more expertise than maybe all of us have, I think it could definitely be possible."

Marks sees the cruiser division as a way to bridge the gap between a science project and something people can imagine driving. But he also makes clear that commercialization is not the metric. The real yield is the pipeline of young people who have learned commitment, teamwork, and engineering by building something that runs on nothing but sunlight. This echoes challenges in other fields, like a Sakana AI experiment on what VLMs miss about human creativity.

"It's not just building a car," Marks stressed. "It's learning how to officially drive that car. In this coming event, one of the things I've been preaching to the kids is, before you ever get here, you need to put 500 miles in your car. You need to know, will it break? You need to know, even if it breaks, let it break in your own parking lot so you can fix it."

The 2024 race runs July 19-23. The winner is the team that logs the most miles. The harder measure of success will take another decade or two.