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This is a convenience feature for fully electric cars. Charge at home, leave it parked at work and it recharges a fair bit. Won't make as much of a difference o
by olefoo 7y ago
This is a convenience feature for fully electric cars. Charge at home, leave it parked at work and it recharges a fair bit. Won't make as much of a difference on a longer road trip; but will increase the range between mandatory recharges.
If you want you probably could go full martian if you got an external solar array you could deploy when stopped.
The real win is going to be on mid-sized electric vans and RVs since you have more surface area and could deploy a charging array as a canopy.
Think of a 300 ft^3 van ( about the size of a Sprinter )
with full wrap solar panels and an additional 100 ft^2 of solar panel that could be deployed when parked.
If you were using it as an RV you could plan on extended backcountry camping trips without having to worry about recharging.
- hervature 7y agoFull wrap solar panels would be a silly idea. Almost half of the panels would not be producing power. Effective surface area would be about ~130 ft^2. Even with that additional solar panel, let's call it 250 ft^2, it would produce ~4kW on a clear day. Basically, charging all day might get you 150 miles in a Tesla model S. I would rather just charge my Tesla while eating a sandwich for lunch then pay for the additional complexity.
- olefoo 7y agoThe reason to do full wrap would be so that some of the panels are always producing regardless of orientation of the vehicle.
- driverdan 7y agoYour numbers are off by a lot. A Sprinter roof is around 100ft^2 (not sure why you're saying cubic feet, solar panels are flat and can't overlap). I live in a 25ft shuttle bus. I have solar that covers the roof end-to-end, 1800W. It's a lot but nowhere near enough to recharge batteries to drive a vehicle of this size any reasonable distance.
- olefoo 7y agoUsing cube as the size of the van, not surface.
- wumms 7y agoSolar RV Prototype (German): https://www.promobil.de/dethleffs-erstes-elektro-alkovenmobil-wohnmobil-ehome/ https://www.promobil.de/dethleffs-erstes-elektro-alkovenmobi...
- leggomylibro 7y agoNeat - maybe we'll be able to have renewable-powered sandcrawlers before much longer. I'm honestly surprised that nobody has tried to make a city-block-sized desert vehicle when it's such a common sci-fi concept. Maybe it'd be too hard to tow when it inevitably got stuck.
- perilunar 7y agoI've though about this. 100 x 100 W solar panels charging for 10 hours per day would give you 100 kWh, which is about 500 km range in a Tesla X or S. 100 panels is a lot — you'd need a small trailer to carry them, and set up and packing away each day would be hard work. But it would be possible. US Route 66 (4000 km) would take 8 days. Circumnavigating Australia on Highway 1 (14,500 km) would take ~30 days. Drive at dawn and dusk, park during the day and see the sights.
- herohamp 7y agoAh this is just sounding like The Martian now