While gasoline prices hover around $4 a gallon, that won’t matter to a group of drivers stopping in Neosho Monday on one leg of a 2,400-mile journey.

That’s because these vehicles operate entirely on the sun.

Now held every three years, the North American Solar Challenge 2008 will include solar cars from 15 colleges and universities from across the country that will make the trek from Plano, Texas to Calgary, Alberta Canada in about 10 days.

The solar vehicles are leaving Plano early Sunday morning. Most will arrive for an overnight pit stop at Crowder College on Monday, departing again Tuesday morning for parts northward.

The winner of the timed race is determined by how long it takes each sun-powered car to reach designated stage stops along the way. Each day, the race won’t continue until all of the vehicles are gathered. At the end of the race, the times are calculated and the team with the shortest overall time is declared the winner, receiving as prize the coveted Wilson Cup, which has the names of all previous winners engraved on it. 

This year’s event is co-sponsored by Crowder, Toyota and Defond. 

Dan Eberle, construction technology instructor at Crowder’s MARET Center, and one of the main organizers of this year’s event, called the solar challenge more of a “rally” of solar cars than an actual race.

Arriving in Neosho will be solar cars designed and driven by students from the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Iowa State University, Oregon State University, the University of Calgary, the University of Kentucky, the University of Arizona, the University of Waterloo, Queen’s University, Durham University, Northwestern University, Red River College and Principia College, as well as the FH Bochum Solar Car Team.

Eberle said these team cars are just the ones that passed the event’s “scrutineering.”

“These are the fewest we’ve ever had, but we feel like they’re generally more of a well-prepared field than we’ve had before,” he said. “These are all very-well prepared teams.”

The route takes the solar cars from Plano to Neosho, to Sioux Falls, S.D., to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Medicine Hat, Alberta and finally to the finish line at Calgary, Alberta. There are also several checkpoints along the way in McAlester, Okla., Topeka, Kan., Fargo, N.D., Brandon, Manitoba and Regina, Saskatchewan.

“That would be hard to do in your dad’s automobile — it’s a long drive,” Eberle said. “And they’re doing it entirely on solar (energy).” 

He said the sun-powered vehicles will be using main highways the whole journey, but will avoid Interstates. The cars will all maintain highway speed the entire trip, however, with a top limit capped at 65 miles per hour.

As for the vehicles themselves, well, they don’t exactly look like the average car on the road, Eberle said. Most measure roughly 16-foot long and six and a half feet wide.

“They look like something you would expect to see on ‘Lost in Space,’” he said.

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For anyone interested in checking out the futuristic gas-alternative vehicles, the solar cars will be parked west of the Crowder softball field on the college campus. They will depart from the Freeman Family YMCA Tuesday morning at 9 a.m.