A group of engineering students spent years chasing a shared dream: to complete the first coast-to-coast American road trip fully powered by the sun. What could possibly go wrong?
Even on a sunny day in June, there are few more unspectacular places in America for a dream road trip to limp to an end than the Holiday Inn parking lot in Logansport, Indiana. This is especially true-and the sunshine especially ironic-when you're driving a homemade solar car, attempting to complete the first solar-powered trip across America.
So it was for Kyle Samluk '24, Danny Ezzo '25, and Will Jones in the summer of 2021. The friends had spent nearly a year dreaming up, designing, and building what they hoped would be the first car fully powered by sunlight to complete the infamous cross-country road race known as the Cannonball Run. Conceived in 1971 by late Car and Driver editor Brock Yates and popularized in a series of Hollywood films in the 1970s and early '80s starring Burt Reynolds, the renegade road race between New York and Los Angeles has since evolved into a self-guided contest of dodging police and suppressing bowel movements using military-grade tactical dehydration pills while averaging speeds well above any speed limit in America.
"We're car guys, so early on during the pandemic, we started seeing reports and tales of people breaking Cannonball Run speed records, because there was no traffic," Will says. "So we had the idea of doing a Cannonball Run in a solar car. It seemed like sort of a safe, legal way to participate in this outlaw event. We thought it might inspire people to get more interested in solar power and other alternative energy sources. Plus, no one had ever driven a solar car from New York to Los Angeles. It seemed like an epic adventure and an epic challenge."
While the rest of the world was doomscrolling and Netflixing their way through Thanksgiving break of 2020, the three friends were maxing out the monthly Wi-Fi data at Will's parents' house during a marathon computer-aided drafting session. Once they had their design sussed out, they holed up in a shop in DeWitt, Michigan, and got to work. The shop belonged to Russ Pline, Kyle and Will's math teacher at Okemos High School, from which they had graduated in 2019. Prior to housing the solar car, Pline used the space to restore vintage hot rods and campers from the 1930s.
"Just before spring break, I get a call from the guys, and they say they have an idea," Pline recalls. "So we go out to lunch, and they've already designed the car. I could tell it had some shortcomings. The design-an aluminum monocoque body setup, good execution of a design-showed they lacked some experience. But there's also just no substitute for experience. I said, 'You guys are trying to do something big here. Shame on me if I don't help you.'"
With Pline's assistance, the trio built the car in a hurry and gave it a name to match their rose-colored optimism: Pink Skies. It looked like a cross between a ping-pong table and a hovercraft-and during the car's first test run, it performed more like the former than the latter. The aluminum frame on which the solar panels were mounted was sturdy but heavy, as were the three ill-positioned motorcycle tires supporting the frame. One of the few components that did not show clear room for improvement was the maximum power point tracker, or MPPT-the electrical device responsible for converting DC power from the solar panels and delivering it to the battery powering the motor. The same MPPT had been among the best-performing elements of the first solar car that Kyle and Will had built together in high school. That car had come in second place at the annual Solar Car Challenge, an international competition for high schoolers held at Texas Motor Speedway. Pink Skies, however, gave up the ghost after a mere five miles on the test track.
With only a month left to fix major suspension issues and rebuild the entire front end of the car, the guys dove back into work. They were ambitious and enthusiastic, but their self-imposed start date of June 24 forced them to rush. They cut some corners but managed to make all the necessary repairs just in time, then tossed all the tools and spare parts they owned into the trailer and headed to New York.
"We tried to plan for everything, but at that point we had no experience with doing something crazy like that," Danny says. "But nobody else did either. There was nothing really to learn from. So we were cautiously optimistic."
On June 24, the Pink Skies team set out from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan. By the time they reached the Lincoln Tunnel, cautious optimism had given way to pure stress. New York City drivers were none too thrilled to be stuck in traffic behind the Jetsons' recumbent tricycle, which cruised at speeds between 25 and 30 miles per hour.
Once out of the city, the team settled into something like a rhythm, inching their way across the highways of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Along the way, while struggling to service Pink Skies during its many roadside breakdowns, they longed for the shelter and well-stocked tool selection of Pline's shop. By the time they crossed into Indiana-where they spent two full days dodging thunderstorms, fretting as a few essential electrical components got wet from the rain-morale was bottoming out.
Then, the death knell: In Logansport, the motor controller failed.
The team had no backup motor controller with them. Even if they had, they lacked many of the technical skills needed to install one on the fly. They shuffled the car into the parking lot at the Holiday Inn and considered what to do. Pink Skies had made it some 760 miles, but the team was still more than 2,000 miles from the finish line at the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach.
With the remaining distance dragging their dreams down into cold, hard reality, they made the call to scrap the attempt.
"That was pretty devastating," says Kyle. "You spend countless hours working, only to achieve nothing, right?"
Crestfallen, they pushed the banged-up solar car into the trailer, strapped it in, closed the door, and headed north-back to Michigan. The ride home was spent in brooding silence. When they got back to DeWitt, the three friends went their separate ways and took a few weeks to lick their proverbial wounds. They reflected on all that had gone wrong. They thought about how they could have prepared better. And they considered, each in his own way, the question that eventually faces anyone who dares to chase a dream, only to come up well short of making it a reality:
Again?
Erwin George "Cannon Ball" Baker was a vaudeville performer turned motorcycle and automobile enthusiast who raced his way to fame in the early 20th century. Baker made dozens of record-setting speed runs across America, during which he was paid to promote Indian motorcycles, Cadillac roadsters, and the other vehicles he drove. Baker set dozens of driving records from the 1910s through the 1930s, including the automobile record from Los Angeles to New York City, which he first set in 1915 in a Stutz Bearcat over 11 days, seven hours, and 15 minutes. "No record, no money" was Baker's bold promise to the companies who sponsored him. It was this audacity that inspired Yates to name the Cannonball Run after Baker, partially as a kind of gonzo protest against the strict traffic laws of the 1970s.
In 2013, nearly a hundred years after Baker's Bearcat rolled into New York City in an unthinkably fast 11 days, a team led by YouTuber Ed Bolian set a new Cannonball Run record in a modified 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG: 28 hours and 50 minutes. Six years later, during the early COVID traffic lull, a driving team led by Arne Toman and Doug Tabbutt lowered the record to 25 hours and 39 minutes, driving a modified 2016 Audi S6 disguised to look like a Ford Taurus police interceptor and affectionately dubbed the Fraud Taurus. Bolian averaged 98 mph during his run and hit a top speed of 182 mph. Toman and Tabbutt never went above 175 mph, but they averaged a blistering 110 mph.
Danny knows these names and numbers by heart. Bolian, Tabbutt, Toman, and other motorheads of the YouTube era have been idols of his since he first got interested in cars at age 14. The Cannonball bug bit Kyle and Will a bit later but no less fiercely. After taking some time to reflect on their first attempt, they made a decision in step with all those who dive headlong into such adventures for the sake of, well, adventure: They decided to keep their dream of making the first and fastest solar-powered Cannonball Run alive.
"We took some time off and debated on what the next step should be: build a new car or try to repair Pink Skies," says Kyle. "It probably took us six months to come to a final decision. Ultimately, we decided to redesign from scratch."
Nothing was sacred and nearly everything was up for consideration-the chassis, the suspension, the motors, the solar array-everything. While budget constraints prevented the guys from using carbon fiber for the frame or flexible solar panels for power generation, they made other smart design tweaks toward improving the solar car's serviceability, efficiency, heat management, and weight-like swapping the motorcycle tires for bicycle tires. Modifications like these added up, then multiplied, as the lighter car then required a smaller, lighter battery pack to power it.
"The first car was really hard to work on and it was really, really heavy," says Kyle. "We took our time deliberating when designing the next one."
They even gave attention to the support trailer, stocking it with replacement forks, extra motors, extra bicycle tires, and plenty of tubes, plus all the necessary tools for repair stored in easy-to-access locations.
"On the first trip there was plenty of stuff in the trailer that we didn't use," says Danny. "We just kind of threw it all in. The next time around, we were very intentional. Everything we put in the trailer had a purpose."
The only problem-or challenge, depending on your approach to life-was that Danny, Kyle, and Will were not brand-sponsored road racers or YouTubers. They were full-time engineering students-Kyle and Danny at Michigan Tech, some 500 miles away from Pline's shop in DeWitt, and Will at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. (For their second attempt, the team also decided to add a fourth driver: Brett Cesar, a friend of Kyle and Will's from high school and an engineering student at Michigan State.) Kyle and Danny were also varsity student-athletes on the Michigan Tech cross-country team, meaning their free time was limited and precious.
For the next two and half years, they chose to devote nearly every second of it to chasing their solar car dreams. They spent most nights and weekends, along with every holiday break, not with their families or friends or girlfriends, but with Pline in his shop.
"It's sort of rare at our stage in life to be able to just drop real life for a while and build a solar car," says Will. "We could all be working internships or jobs, but every Thanksgiving, every Christmas break, every free minute over the summer where it was possible, we were in the garage working on this car. In the winter, it would be 20 degrees outside and 23 degrees in the shop. We'd be freezing our tails off. Just shows how passionate we were, and how committed."
Long winter days of wrenching on the car in the unheated shop were broken up with well-earned meals prepared by Pline's wife Vicki, or at the nearby South Riley Grocery, Tavern & Grill-one of those unassuming rural Michigan hideouts whose owners know that pretty-looking signage is far less important than burgers that taste good.
"When Vicki would make us all lunch, these guys would do their own dishes," Pline says. "Clean up after themselves, take the trash out, clean up the kitchen, clean up the shop. These seem like little things, but they are big things that show just how thoughtful these young guys are. Just phenomenal people."
In late June of 2024-six years after Will first came to Pline with the idea for the high school solar car, and three years after Pink Skies' journey ended in Indiana-the team's next build was complete. Christened the Sun Strider, the new solar car featured a budget-conscious frame made of square steel tubing; eight hinged solar panels, which could be propped up for improved serviceability and charging; three bicycle motocross (or BMX) tires; 3D-printed nose and tail cones; and one aerodynamic polycarbonate dome topping the cockpit. Weighing in at a lean 590 pounds, the Sun Strider was ready for the open road. The last thing the guys did at Pline's shop was finish building out the workbench for the trailer, double-checking to make sure it was stocked with everything they'd need and nothing they didn't.
"There was a moment there where I said to them, 'Okay, what else?'" Pline recalls. "And Kyle said, 'I think that's it. I think we're good.' And that's when it hit me. I thought, 'Oh, I think this really is it. This is the end of an era. I don't think these guys are ever coming back.'"
Pline, along with many of the team's family members and friends-and a surprisingly large media contingent covering the automotive industry and Michigan's Lower Peninsula-planned to follow online as the team progressed on their cross-country journey, which they had begun calling the Cannonball Sun. Pline didn't think he would catch the conclusion of the journey, though. The same week in August when the guys were expecting the Sun Strider to roll into California, Pline was scheduled to be running a car at Bonneville Speed Week in Utah. So, in July, just before the team headed east to New York, he met them at Will's dad's house in Haslett, where he gave them hugs, encouragement, road snacks, and a bottle of champagne.
"I told them, 'You guys are gonna need this at the Portofino.'"
Day 1: The Sun Strider rolled out of the Red Ball Garage on July 8 at 4:21 a.m., rolling through midtown Manhattan in full darkness on a fully charged battery thanks to sunshine the day before. The guys quickly encountered poor road conditions, limited visibility, and, even in pre-dawn, significant traffic-with many gawkers slowing down to record phone videos of the Sun Strider in action
