![]() ![]() “My roommate was an engineer and he calculated it would take 50,000 hours to build such a car. This would be my way of doing my share for the environment and hopefully inspiring others to do the same.”īefore long, the idea of building a solar-powered car became an obsession. “We are all hypocrites,” said da Luz, “waiting for our governments to save the planet, but we need to start doing it ourselves. Solar-powered cars were already out there, but he would build his own from scratch, take it on the road, push it into the record books, and spread the solar gospel at schools and campgrounds along the way. But, said da Luz, “I was not particularly scientific, I had no means to build such a thing, I’m a nobody - so I left the idea on the back burner.”Īfter moving in 1990 to Canada, the dream refused to die. I thought those cars were so futuristic and so positive for the world. Mesmerized by the sci-fi solar-cars racing in the inaugural World Solar Challenge through the Australian Outback, da Luz said “a light bulb went off for me. It’s the manifestation of a vision da Luz first had watching television in his native Sao Paulo back in 1987. “Everywhere he goes, people come together around him and his car.” When it broke down in the small Northern California town of Redway, “a bunch of residents picked the thing up and carried it to the KMUD radio station’s parking lot where Marcelo got it going again.”īut the car he calls “XOF1” - or the power of one - is more than just a 13-foot-long, 470-pound oddity quietly rolling down North America’s backroads. “He’s like a magnet,” said John Schaefer, 71, a renewable energy consultant who met da Luz in Arcata three weeks ago and volunteered to follow him to the Bay Area in the support van. Residents in one Alaska town called the cops to report a UFO rolling through their neighborhood. His car’s flattened fiberglass sheath, floating less than three feet off the ground, has turned heads from Toronto to Vancouver and the Golden Gate Bridge. The vehicle seems as unlikely as its creator, a Brazilian-born former flight attendant with no scientific or engineering experience. It’s bizarre, but this journey has become everything for me.” ![]() “I lost my girlfriend and my job because of this crazy passion. “I’ve got no wife, no kids - only a cat, and she probably doesn’t remember me anymore,” da Luz, 40, said the other day, waiting out the rain at a friend’s place in Palo Alto. And it fuels his solar evangelism, sharing with a fossil-fueled world his passion for sun power.Īfter three seasons on a drive to set the world’s distance record for a solar-powered vehicle, this addiction to sunlight has turned da Luz into a daydreamy vagabond - over his head in debt, at the mercy of strangers, dependent on the 26 lithium-ion batteries pushing him through a world governed by serendipity. It powers the silicon cells covering his three-wheeled roadster like a rattlesnake skin, bringing his record-breaking quest this week to Palo Alto, where he’s taking a break. From stem to stern across the continent, skirting blacktop and blue highway in his oddball little electric car, Marcelo da Luz has devoted the last eight months of his life to following the sun. ![]()
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