The car was built by the SUNY New Paltz Solarcar Racing Team in partnership with The SolarEnergy Consortium as a way to promote environmentally conscious design and solar power as a viable energy source for personal transportation.
It also makes each Solar City installation team potentially doubly productive, if it can design a solar installation and do an energy audit in one shot.
Fraunhofer also will design a system to allow the solarenergy equipment to check itself for proper installation and to send its power generation data to the local utility.
In practice that generally means dramatically reducing energy consumption through passive design measures and installing a small amount of on-site energy generation, often solar.
The design aims to increase efficiency by reducing the amount of energy lost when sunlight is reflected off the solar cell or absorbed into the material before reaching the contact wires.