YOu have to park it on Mercury.And who would buy a $150,000 car that you have to park outside all the time in order to charge it?
And we thought the i3 has skinny wheels....
+1All I can say is good luck Lightyear! Call me when it's for sale.
That's different though, one is usually talking a far larger array than what you could install on a car. The limitation in the latter is square feet - the amount of solar panels you can stuff onto a car is token in comparison to the requirements to actually charge it in anything less than many, many days...assuming full sun.Also note that the car would still be powered by the sun if you charged it at home using solar panels.
It's more cost effective to build a solar roof over the EV parking stalls -- saves worrying about aerodynamics, the panels can be elevated to the correct orientation for the latitude, and there's about 20 sq meters per stall instead. That's enough power at typical efficiencies to pump an 8-amp Level 1 charge to the car below through the midday.Agreed, powering a car fully by the sun cannot work. However, as a supplementary power source is could make a lot of sense. A typical car has 1 to 2 m^2 of usable top surface area. That should provide at 1 to 4 kWhr on a sunny day. For comparison, my 2014 Volt has a max capacity of about 13.5 kWhrs, so the energy from the sun is more than negligible. Especially, when you consider that all the electronics in any modern car are constantly drawing power even when the car is parked. This is can be even worse on fully electric cars. I would feel a lot more confident about leaving such a car in the airport parking lot for long trip. So, if solar panels become cheap enough, why not slap them on a car?
A fair argument, but we are talking some pretty well known limitations of solar power. Until the technology make some quantum leap there's no visionary out there that can make a solar car realistic.Good thing visionaries in our society don't listen to this crowd. If they did none of us would be driving something called a Volt.
Which is said in this video.To suggest that a visionary could somehow solve this is akin to suggesting that we should have had 250 mile electric cars in the 50's because there were visionaries then. The reality is however, that the battery technology just wasn't there at that time.
'zactly. The amount of insolation is a measurable known that won't change until we blow off the atmosphere. The conversion rate of that to electricity by photovoltaic cells is known, and changes slowly. (We're not going to get 100% efficient cells tomorrow. We MIGHT get flexible cells from ~20% efficient to ~25% sometime, over a relatively short couple of years. It's happened before. Fixed panels are up to about 45% for the best of the best, and "cheap crap" ones are 25-30%.)A fair argument, but we are talking some pretty well known limitations of solar power. Until the technology make some quantum leap there's no visionary out there that can make a solar car realistic.
