Solar Car World Rankings Revisited

Nuon at WSC 17 (photo: Anthony Dekker)

Below is my personal world ranking of the top 21 Challenger-class solar car teams (revised with new data from an earlier list). It was produced entirely algorithmically by using linear regression on historical data to build mappings between WSC rankings and those of other races, and then applying those mappings to the results of four recent events (WSC 17, ASC 18, ESC 18, and Sasol 18). For example, this is the mapping between Sasol placings and WSC placings. It was used to map all Sasol 18 teams to expected WSC placings:

There is as yet insufficient data to rate Cruiser-class teams (apart from the actual WSC 17 results: 1 Eindhoven, 2 Bochum, 3 Arrow). But here is the table of Challengers:

Rank	Previous	Team	WSC17	ASC18	ESC18	Sasol18
1	1	Nuon Solar Team	1			1
2 ↑	3	Solar Team Twente	5		1
3 ↓	2	University of Michigan	2	2
4	4	Punch Powertrain Solar Team	3		6
5	5	Tokai University	4			2
6 ↑	–	Sonnenwagen Aachen	P		3
7 ↓	6	Western Sydney Solar Team	6	1
8 ↑	18	Solar Energy Racers				3
9 ↓	8	Kecskemét College GAMF (Megalux)			4
10 ↓	7	Kogakuin University	7
11 ↓	9	JU Solar Team	8
12 ↓	10	Stanford Solar Car Project	9
13 ↑	–	Tshwane University of Technology (TUT)				4
14 ↓	11	Antakari Solar Team	10
15 ↓	13	University of Toronto (Blue Sky)	11
16 ↓	14	ETS Quebec (Eclipse)		3
17 ↓	15	Nagoya Institute of Technology	12
18 ↓	12	North West University	P			5
19 ↑	–	Eco Solar Breizh			7
20 ↓	17	Poly Montreal (Esteban)		4
21 ↓	19	Massachusetts Institute of Technology		5

Note that Cruiser teams like Eindhoven, Bochum, and Arrow are excluded from the list. The letter P marks cars that participated in WSC 17, but did not finish, and thus were not ranked at the time. It must also be said that Western Sydney, Eclipse, Esteban, and MIT should probably be ranked higher than they are here – the algorithm is not taking into account the dramatic improvement in ASC teams this year. However, good ESC and Sasol performance has bumped up Aachen, SER, Eco Solar Breizh, and South Africa’s new champion team, TUT.

Michigan at WSC 17 (photo: Anthony Dekker)

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