UNSW Students Break Guinness World Record!

Students at the University of New South Wales have broken a Guinness World Record! The UNSW Sunswift solar racing team built a solar-powered electric vehicle called Sunswift 7 and completed the challenge of travelling 1,000 km on a single charge within 12 hours, claiming the title of “world’s fastest”!

Sunswift 7 completed 240 laps of the track — a distance roughly equivalent to driving from Sydney to Melbourne. Despite some bumps along the way, including a tyre puncture and a battery system fault, the UNSW student team pushed through and successfully completed the challenge in 11 hours, 52 minutes and 8 seconds, averaging nearly 85 km/h with an energy consumption of just 3.8 kWh per 100 km. Driver changes were required every few hours during the attempt.

The team captain is Andrea Holden, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at UNSW, and the overall director is Professor Richard Hopkins, who brings extensive Formula 1 experience to the project. From their first car in 1996 through to today, the Sunswift team has produced a series of impressive solar-powered vehicles. Sunswift 7 weighs just 500 kg — roughly a quarter of a Tesla — and is characterised by extremely low rolling resistance, outstanding efficiency, aerodynamic design, and a highly efficient drivetrain.

These students are not professional car manufacturers — they are simply a group of passionate car enthusiasts. Their time at UNSW, one of Australia’s top engineering universities, has been instrumental in their success, and Sunswift is widely regarded as one of the university’s premier engineering programmes.

If you have a passion for engineering, UNSW offers world-class engineering disciplines and flagship programmes — it could be the perfect destination for you!

Official Rebuttal! USYD Calls Out Social Media Rumours

Recently, a number of posts on a popular Chinese social media platform claimed that USYD would stop accepting “non-985/211” students within a few years. A screenshot of an email purportedly from a USYD postgraduate programme stated that, due to the high volume of applicants, the university would no longer accept students from non-985 or non-211 institutions from Semester 2, 2025.

Yesterday, however, USYD officially stepped in to set the record straight. The university directly called out Xiaohongshu (RedNote), stating: “Misinformation about USYD’s admission policies has recently appeared on some social media platforms. These rumours are false. We remind everyone that any changes to USYD’s admission information must be confirmed through official channels.”