Company History

Tritium is founded on a passion for innovative electronic systems that was first nurtured within the SunShark solar car racing team.

In 1998, this team was planning to defend its title as Australia's fastest solar car in the upcoming World Solar Challenge (WSC) and it was this goal that grabbed the attention of the now Tritium team, David Finn, James Kennedy and Paul Sernia. These beginnings were to spark a decade-long interest in renewable and energy efficient systems.

The WSC is an international event for solar powered cars to race more than 3000 kilometres between Darwin and Adelaide — right across the Australian outback. The event has attracted many of the world's premier car makers with multi‐million dollar budgets who have competed alongside universities and other common interest groups.

To maintain its position amongst such an esteemed field of competitors, the SunShark ‘99 project was necessarily ambitious. In the space of two years almost every part of the car was redesigned to be lighter, more efficient, or take advantage of new component technology.

David was appointed team leader of the electrical system redevelopment. By the time the SunShark hit the start line in Darwin, it had a new solar array, lithium-ion batteries, a custom battery monitoring system, custom telemetry system, custom motor controller and a custom “drive-by-wire” driver controls system.

SunShark finished third in the race, once again demonstrating how smart innovative ideas and good management can defeat big budgets.

One year later, David, James & Paul founded Tritium to commercialise the unique know-how they had gained through solar car racing. Tritium could have taken many paths during the early days of operation however the company was soon approached by another solar racing team that had seen the SunShark motor controller and wanted a similarly light-weight and efficient motor controller.

This resulted in the Gold Controller — a new motor controller that was quickly adopted by the majority of Australian solar racing teams as well as some international teams.

In 2005 Tritium was awarded a grant from the Queensland Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund (QSEIF) to further develop its motor controller technology. By the beginning of 2007, Tritium had their flagship product, the WaveSculptor motor controller ready for market.

In the lead-up to the most recent WSC in 2007, Tritium had sold WaveSculptors to approximately one third of the race entrants. This event was a great success for the company, with 6 out of the top 10 competitors using a Tritium WaveSculptor, including the second and third placed teams.

Although Tritium's passion is for renewable and efficient power electronic systems, the company approaches any electronics engineering problem with similar enthusiasm.

Take some time out and have a look at our previous projects page to see some of the many interesting projects we have been engaged in.