Zimbabwe is a country with an incredibly high maternal mortality rate, but a new solar taxi by Australian researchers could help to reduce the number of deaths in the country.
In 2014, Zimbabwe had around 614 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the World Health Oragnisation. The distance from health facilities and having to take transport were cited as reasons for why women don’t seek medical care during childbirth and pregnancy.
However, a solar taxi could help to solve transportation problems to take women from their remote villages to health care facilities to give birth.
Peter Pudney, senior research fellow at the University of South Australia, became involved in the project when he received an email following a trip around the world with TREV, a two-seater renewable energy vehicle. A health worker from Zimbabwe asked him if it would be possible to build a solar-powered car to transport pregnant women to hospital.
“My initial reaction was, ‘You’d never fit a pregnant woman in the back of TREV’,” Pudney said.
“If you look at the traditional solar racing cars that race from Darwin to Adelaide every couple of years, they’re flimsy little machines designed for carrying a lunatic pilot at high speeds across the roads – certainly not the sort of thing you could use (in Zimbabwe).”
Pudney then started thinking of alternatives to building a solar powered car. For example, a standard vehicle that ran on diesel or petrol, but this was not feasible due to the high cost of fuel in Zimbabwe.
Next he thought of an off-the-shelf golf cart powered by electricity. But that wasn’t an option because electricity is unreliable in the country.
Pudney then started conceptualising what a solar powered car might look like and whether it could work in Zimbabwe.
“When we started we were thinking that maybe we wanted a solution that worked on a bicycle – it’s simple, doesn’t require external energy sources and we looked at what’s been happening in similar parts of the world,” he said.
However, as Pudney found out more about the vehicle’s requirements, he realised a bicycle wouldn’t work because it had to be able to transport the expectant mother as well as a birthing partner. This meant the car needed to be able to carry three people, including the driver.
The vehicle’s wheels also needed to be sturdy due to the poor condition of the roads and it also needed to be as low and light as possible.
The team responsible for the taxi’s development includes industrial design and engineering students from UniSA and volunteers from the community who had worked on TREV. They met every week to work out the best way to build the vehicle.
During one of the meetings, a team member brought in an ATV tire from a quad bike. They plunged a screwdriver into the tire and watched it deflate, and then put a rubber plug into the puncture and re-inflated it with a hand pump.
“That’s the kind of reliability and repair that we needed, so we designed the vehicle from the tires upwards, trying to keep it as simple as possible, but using the same materials and construction techniques that we’d used on TREV,” Pudney said.
Pudney said it was also important the car was made from materials that could be sourced and repaired in Zimbabwe. Instead of using aluminium, which was hard to repair in Zimbabwe, the team used lightweight polypropylene honeycomb boards, which they built themselves, with fiberglass and a Kevlar skin, mainly where it has to take suspension loads. Off-the-shelf bicycle hub motors in the two rear wheels propel it.
All up the taxi, which has been dubbed the African Solar Taxi, weighs about 150 kg and it will be able to cover about 70 to 80 km on a charge. It is expected it will undertake two to four trips per day, covering up to 250 km.
Two solar charging stations will be installed – one at St Albert's Mission Hospital, just south of the Zambezi valley at the northern edge of Zimbabwe, and another around 40 km south at David Nelson health clinic. The taxi will require around 20 kWh per day.
“We will use 60 kWh of batteries, split between the two charging stations, to provide up to two days of energy for the taxi, plus some energy for the clinic. We will need 10 kW of solar panels to generate the energy,” Pudney said.
Pudney said the team is still undecided about which battery technology to use – more expensive lithium ion or cheaper but older lead acid technology. A small inverter will also be able to give 230 V power to the clinic for normal electricity use.
The team is still building the prototype and has yet to test the vehicle. However, the design has been completed and Pudney hopes to ship it to Zimbabwe later this year or early next year.
Once the vehicle is completed, Pudney plans to make the design open source.
“Our aim is to demonstrate the concept, show that it works and then encourage other people to build the next generation of taxis that will improve on what we’ve already done,” he said.
“Hopefully we can inspire other people to improve the design and get it to a point where it can be manufactured more easily and more cheaply and get more of them on the ground.”
[Image shows a rendering of the African Solar Taxi. The final version won't have a roof.]