Solar Car Challenge

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Altair's Solar Car Challenge 2025

And the winner is...

While the race between the 18 participating teams was very tight, and the optimization results were incredibly impressive throughout all the teams that were able to complete the challenge, the first-placing team left all competitors far behind.

The team from the University of British Columbia won this year's Grand Prize of $10,000.

Watch how they received their big chec k at the winner's ceremony

But we are congratulating all winning teams:

🥇 1st: University of British Columbia
🥈 2nd: University of Florida
🥉 3rd: McMaster University

Judges' Choice Awards

🏆 Lightest Weight Design: Purdue University
🏆 Hottest Design (Best Use of Optimization + PolyNURBS): Western Ontario University

A huge Thank You goes out to the entire FSGP staff and all teams for welcoming us with open arms at this incredible event, another time. We had an absolute blast and are so impressed with the innovation and thought leadership that these student teams are able to pull off within the short time of our challenge! We can't wait to see what the Altair Solar Car Challenge will have in stock in 2027. See you there!

Last Year's Winners

UF Gators from University of Florida

With an emotional winners' ceremony, the Altair Solar Challenge 2024 came to an end on July 18th, 2024, when we were proud to announce and congratulate the winning teams:

🥇 1st: University of Florida
🥈 2nd: University of Michigan
🥉 3rd: University of Minnesota

Watch the incredibly heart-warming reaction of the UF Gators from the University of Florida, when their win of $10,000 was announced at the event.

Prepare yourself for the Challenge

Learn the Inspire Workflow

Using Altair Inspire for this challenge will make you most likely to be successful. To learn the tool, we provide this recorded on-demand learning session.

Download the model file from the video to work through the process.
For more Learning content, visit the Inspire Academic Hub and find all learning resources in one place.

Register Now

Challenge Details

Solar Teams

Qualifications

Team registration through the form had to be submitted by July 1st, 2025 (one registration per team is sufficient).
Teams were expected to field a vehicle in FSGP that is all green on the pre-race board to participate in the event on-site (and to qualify for the Grand Prize).

Note: Teams that are not all green were welcome and encouraged to participate in the Altair Challenge, but are not eligible for the Grand Prize of $10,000. They were, however, eligible for the equipment and participation prizes.

Teams needed to obtain an Altair Sponsorship License (Request here)
Teams were required to agree to participate in the creation of marketing materials about the challenge (e.g., team photos, interviews, testimonials).

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Process

Teams had to provide their own laptop pre-loaded with Altair Inspire.
While teams may take their laptops with them at the end of the day, work on the contest submission may ONLY take place during the contest hours, at the contest location. Any work done outside of this limitation will result in immediate and permanent disqualification from the Altair Challenge.
Altair representatives were on-site to offer guidance and support throughout the challenge.

Portrait of young man filling in application form

Submissions

Your submission must comprise the completed geometry, the finite element (FE) results, and a concise one-page report.

This report should include:

The results and total mass,
The factor of safety for all load cases, as indicated at the challenge introduction,
Your intended manufacturing method, and
A brief summary of your design process.

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How to Win

The team with the ‘lowest mass’ design, combined with the overall factor of safety (FoS) and accomplished design criteria, won.

Design criteria:

Passes feasibility test with a FoS greater than 1.
Is manufacturable.
Fits within the provided volume bounding box.
Uses materials outlined in the IEF Rules

In the event of a tie, the winner will be decided by the time stamp on the submitted report.
Winners were announced and received their prizes at the awards ceremony on July 5th.