It’s Saturday morning and a winter fog clings to the hilly paddocks at The University of Western Sydney’s Kingswood campus. Inside block Z, a team of 25 engineering and industrial design students, alumni and multi-disciplined volunteers are building a solar-powered car from scratch. Come October 2013, in stark contrast to weather outside, they hope to race it from Darwin to Adelaide in the next World Solar Challenge. But before the team negotiates the desert, road trains, bush fires and better funded competition – they face immediate design and funding challenges. This is their story, and Gizmodo is along for the ride.