In Bali, he met Mike Fincken, Captain of the “Rainbow Warrior II”, who was so enthusiastic about the idea of touring the world emission free that he spontaneously invited the Solar taxi to find a temporary home on board of the Greenpeace ship – which was bound for Whangarei, New Zealand.
Now the solartaxi is going to arrive by boat, coming from Christchurch, on January 29, 2007. On his return to Switzerland, Mr. Palmer will have travelled through 5 continents, more than 40 countries and over 40,000 km – and will have shared the two-seater cabin with ministers, hoboes, journalists, backpackers, and a Jordanian prince.
It took 3 years to build the solartaxi. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and three Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences have been involved in its making, integrating top-notch technologies – and a flexible steering-wheel that allows the passenger to take control of the vehicle running at a maximum speed of 90 kph the sustainable way.
The car pulls a trailer equipped with high-efficiency solar panels from his main sponsor Q-Cells which generate roughly 50% of the electricity needed to run the car. The other half is generated through solar panels on top of the headquarters of sponsor Swisscom and reaches the solartaxi through the grid – symbolized by the fact that the solar taxi recharges its batteries at Swiss embassies, whenever possible. The grid works like a bank, from where Palmer can withdraw his earlier deposits when travelling by night or on a cloudy day.
From the travel Diary
A record performance for the Solar Taxi. Louis Palmer drives 375 kilometres across the deserted Nullarbor Plain. As always, he is accompanied by animals – just managing to avoid crashing into a dead kangaroo.
"Be careful, there are kangaroos all over the road at night", the woman in the roadhouse at Eucla warns me. But I want to go another 70 kilometres today, even though the sun has already set. Of course I don’t see a single kangaroo, especially not in the glaring headlights of oncoming road trains, but I have my headlights on high beam. SOLAR TAXI: NEAR MISS WITH A DEAD KANGAROO
Help! I wrench the steering wheel round and shoot out into the gravelly darkness. There’s a dead kangaroo in the middle of the road. I don’t want to think about what might have happened if I hadn’t had the headlights on high beam. Hitting it would not only have shattered the car body, but may also have pulled off a wheel or my solar cell trailer and sent me hurtling out me into the bushes.
A Desert Full of Trees
Kangaroos can grow up to two metres high, so road trains sport huge steel grilles called "bull bars". Maybe I should get a "bull bar" too. The only problem would be that it would weigh as much as the whole Solar Taxi.
I drive cautiously on, followed by the stink of cadaver and a cool tailwind. My escort bus is somewhere up ahead. Erik and Laura are constantly on the lookout for power for their laptops so they can cut the newest action video. Today they unpack a roll of long, silky fabric. We want to re-film the most famous scene of the Australian road movie "Priscilla – Queen of the Desert". But the place where we want to film this desert scene is not desert at all, it’s forest. For hundreds of kilometres in all directions. What about the "Null Arbor", literally translated from Latin as "no trees"? Anyway, filming is cancelled for today.
Half Time for The Solar Taxi
But mostly I have the highway entirely to myself. I drive for four hours at a stretch. The occasional glimpse in the rear view mirror, keeping an eye on the thunderous approach of road trains, and a quick look at the battery temperature – nothing else to do. If I kept driving like this every day, the Solar Taxi would be home again in 10 weeks, but we want to be on the road for another nine months. We’ve now been on the road for just one eight months. Next week we celebrate our first milestone – half way through our trip. The next sign shows the distance to our party: 850 km to Perth!