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SOME COMMENTS FROM THE PERIOD

Melbourne Herald 

- "Maybe one day we'll all be driving around in solar-powered cars. And, if that happens, the names of Hans Tholstrup and Larry Perkins will have a place in history. Without men like these, this would be a duller place. The spirit of adventure is not yet dead."

 

The Adelaide News 

- "But even if The Quiet Achiever is destined to be no more than a historic footnote, its journey is still an epic in a nation of epic journeys. It is more than a considerable technological achievement. It is an example of human behaviour in one of the best facets, the combination of visionary, dotty and dogged."

 

The Melbourne Age

 - "The journey of HansTholstrup and Larry Perkins from Perth to Sydney in The Quiet Achiever will go down as one of the pioneering feats in history. Although solar power has been used in less spectacular ways, this was the first trans-continental crossing in a vehicle deriving its energy from the sun. It constitutes the fastest chapter in man's learning how to co-operate with powers beyond his own."

 

The Australian 

- "Seventy years ago, the first journey by car from Perth to Sydney took 28 days. If all goes well today, the same trip will be completed by the first car powered by solar energy in 20 days, though the solar car had the advantage of laid roads, unlike its forebear. Of course, nowadays the trip can be made within hours by air, or only a few days by road or rail. Just as the first car trip was a march for science, in 70 years so will the trip by Hans Tholstrup and Larry Perkins probably be seen as the tentative beginning of a new technology."