The Agoria Solar Team has a core business of building solar cars. We cannot do this alone: our team and progress relies on the support & feedback from over 150 partners in many different sectors. As is tradition, we often invite our partners to Partner Events, where we welcome them to celebrate important milestones with us or to simply have a chat with the team members! 

Last Thursday, we invited our partners to join us in the Antwerp Port House for our Partner Event. The theme of the evening: the four pillars of the Agoria Solar Team.

The Four Pillars of the Solar Team

Besides building solar cars, we take four core values to heart. These are:

Our Partner Event revolved all around becoming familiar with these four pillars. 

As for facilitating & encouraging entrepreneurship, we invited Solar Team alumnus Adrian Baiets to talk about entrepreneurship within the team, specifically our recruitment for Team 2020. As we start our journey to Australia every two years in July, that gives us 15 months to design, build and test the solar car. This leaves little room for extra R&D and big projects. We also noticed that as we returned from Australia, most of our team members spend all their time on their master's thesis or started working. This meant that there was a gap of about 7 months between our team members returning from Australia and our new team starting on the next solar car, where our team made little to no technological advancements. 

By recruiting for Team Chili, we aim to expand our team to be able to keep innovating and to become a stronger team for both the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, as well as the Carrera Solar Atacama.

The second pillar that we placed into the spotlight was generating interest for science & technology among young people. We did this by hosting a panel discussion about promoting STEM in schools. Among the people invited were the host Ismaël Ben-Al-Lal (solar team alumnus & member of the STEM platform), Marc Lambotte (CEO of Agoria), Laurence Schuurman (Young ICT Lady of the Year 2018) and Stephane Berghmans (CEO of Technopolis). Some of the topics discussed were women in technology, the always evolving technologies itself and the role of the government and companies in promoting STEM.

A sneak peak

At the end of the presentations, we wanted to present our final two pillars: promoting renewable technology and promoting advanced technology. We did so by showing our partners an exclusive sneak peak of some of the key components of our next solar car, the BluePoint. Packaged in the boxes in which they will be shipped to Australia, we lifted off the lids to show... 

...Our brand new steering wheel and two mechanical components!

The Steering Wheel.

The Suspension Bracket is one of the components that connects the suspension with the carbon chassis.  Nice to know: the bracket susceptible to the highest forces has to be able to withstand forces up to 10 000 Newton.

This Carbon Tube Insert is glued inside the carbon tubes to construct a mechanical connection with the other components in the car.

Our other two boxes showed... Well, we can't reveal everything if you weren't there!