The event, which began in 1987 to bring together disparate fully electric solar vehicle exercises around the world, resulted in entrepreneurs and auto manufacturers entering an array of unusually shaped vehicles in a 3000km “race” through the heart of Australia. Where the sun always shines.

Wind the clock forward and the event finds itself in a new age. No more are electric vehicles a prototyping exercise – they’re available in showrooms across the planet.

But the Darwin-to-Adelaide challenge remains, positioning itself as a testbed for innovation and a training ground for tech workers of the future.

At its heart, the event is a design challenge that pitches teams staffed by, primarily, undergraduate students against one another. The most successful teams typically combine a mix of state-of-the-art aerodynamics, battery packs and efficient solar array design with clever on-road management.

To put a car into the competition will cost anywhere from the tens of thousands of dollars, to millions of dollars.

And that doesn’t even include the unpaid labour costs, with teams of anywhere from a dozen to more than 100 volunteers spending over a year designing, building and testing their machines for competition.

All require a little luck to make it across the brutal 3000 kilometres.

In 2019, the world-leading Brunel team from the Netherlands was neck-and-neck with Belgian rivals Innoptus when Brunel’s battery pack overheated, burst into flames and melted to the ground as its team stood by helpless to end the thermal runaway.

Days earlier, brutal crosswinds blowing across the Great Victoria Desert in far north South Australia blew several cars off the road.  The event can be brutal.

But it’s worth it when the technology flows through into industry and, eventually, consumer products.

Solar cars are a rarity on the roads, but not unheard of. Lightyear One is a Dutch car company spun out of the Eindhoven University solar team – a previous participant in the event. Toyota’s ev-bz4x SUV has a solar roof, and so too does Mercedes-Benz’s Vision EQXX.

Solar Challenge alumni include Google’s Larry Page (who crewed the University of Michigan team), and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel (a former Stanford University team member). Nasdaq-listed fast-charger company Tritium and renewable tech manufacturer Prohelion both emerged from Australian teams.

That, ultimately, is the modern-day pitch of the event – and the appeal drawing new teams during each edition, including the first competitors from Eastern European nations Estonia and Romania this year.

“The point of this challenge has always been to bring sustainable mobility to market,” says the event’s director Chris Selwood.

“The value of this event extends well beyond solar cars and the 3000 kilometres they travel. The value lies in its people and the lessons they learn [and] our alumni are a cohort of high-achieving changemakers, from global highflyers to garage start-ups.”

Scrutineering for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge opens on October 16 ahead of the official event start on October 22 and the first teams are expected to arrive in Adelaide by Thursday, 26 October.

This story is an extract from Cosmos Magazine. Cosmos Science journalist Matt Agius will report daily from the event.