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Having worked on a solar car as a student project, solar panels on a car are at best a marketing gimmick. There's definitely not enough area on a car to power a

Having worked on a solar car as a student project, solar panels on a car are at best a marketing gimmick. There's definitely not enough area on a car to power a car anyone wants to drive, even under ideal conditions at a reasonable duty cycle, and issues of shading are even worse for a car than a stationary panel. Also solar panels are fragile and encapsulating them so that they are robust enough to be on the exterior of a car costs substantial weight. Putting solar panels on the car is only slightly better than putting them on the road surface. If the car is decent as a plug-in electric car, then it still may be worth getting. If the solar panels are sufficiently non-intrusive they may even be close to neutral in terms of the utility of the car, but they do not improve it.

namibj 6y ago
Solar cells, if thinned down, are flexible enough to confirm to most areas of a typical car. They weigh no more than two kg per square meter including some environmental protection.
totalZero 6y ago
> If the car is decent as a plug-in electric car, then it still may be worth getting. I agree with this. The net grid draw of EVs would decrease if every EV were equipped with solar panels. It's a way of turning the footprint of the car into a source of energy. Not sure how the manufacturing costs work out, but you don't have to replace 100% of the plug-in aspect to substantially reduce the energy costs.
kamranjon 6y ago
There are also flexible CIGS panels which are not fragile and conform well to curved surfaces and are incredibly light weight. I have 960W mounted on my short school bus conversion and am able to run fridge 24/7, water pump, lights, and an induction cook top and have yet to fully drain the two lithium batteries I got. If any community is aware of the advances made in consumer solar recently it's the skoolie/vanlife folks. I think they improve the car not just from a convenience perspective (i rarely drive more than 100 miles a week in the city) but also it helps more of your energy usage come from the sun rather than non-renewable sources you might be indirectly pulling from the wall.
- Rule35 6y ago
  Bus roofs are much better for solar than compact cars and you have a use for that incidental power in a way a car does not. As for the car, I imagine people will burn the energy and more by turning on the air conditioning when they get into their hot car that they intentionally parked in the sun. Did you glue(/etc) the panels to the roof or did you have to mount them on standoffs?
  - kamranjon 6y ago
    I used VHB tape underneath and Eternabond tape over seams to prevent wind from getting underneath - each 60w panel is 2-3 pounds so very light compared to more common panels that need to be structurally mounted to the frame.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      Sounds pretty nice and fairly foolproof. I remember seeing my first solar panel leaning against an old blue and white school bus at a music festival somewhere on the west coast, decades ago. They had a bunch of old auto batteries for storage.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    > turning on the air conditioning You could cool it a bit with a Stirling engine and get a little more power from the overheated interior. ;-)
    - nomel 6y ago
      And you could use some of the extra heat in hot air balloons to offset the weight of all the Stirling engines.
- flavius29663 6y ago
  > an induction cook top You make it sound like you're using a lot of power in that bus, but an induction cook top is at most 2-3 KW. That is 4 horse power. If you want to crawl at 5 mph that might be enough (but not for a skoolie anyway). Cars have a huge power-plant under the hood. 100kW per car, at least. All the cars in a city have far more power than the power plant that supplies the city. Think 10k cars (town)= 1 GW. That is a nuclear reactor... All the cars in the US, 275 million vehicles, at an average of 100KW, have a combined power of 27.5 TW. The total installed electrical power plants in the US are around 0.5 TW. The whole world has only 6 TW of installed power plants. Cars need a lot of power...
jquery 6y ago
Did you click the link?
deftnerd 6y ago
One possible use case of solar panels on a car in bright and hot environments would be running the air blower to continually replace the interior air with the exterior air in order to maintain a reasonable temperature. It's not uncommon in the south for temperatures to exceed 140f inside of the car.

namibj 6y ago

Solar cells, if thinned down, are flexible enough to confirm to most areas of a typical car. They weigh no more than two kg per square meter including some environmental protection.

totalZero 6y ago

> If the car is decent as a plug-in electric car, then it still may be worth getting. I agree with this. The net grid draw of EVs would decrease if every EV were equipped with solar panels. It's a way of turning the footprint of the car into a source of energy. Not sure how the manufacturing costs work out, but you don't have to replace 100% of the plug-in aspect to substantially reduce the energy costs.

kamranjon 6y ago

There are also flexible CIGS panels which are not fragile and conform well to curved surfaces and are incredibly light weight. I have 960W mounted on my short school bus conversion and am able to run fridge 24/7, water pump, lights, and an induction cook top and have yet to fully drain the two lithium batteries I got. If any community is aware of the advances made in consumer solar recently it's the skoolie/vanlife folks. I think they improve the car not just from a convenience perspective (i rarely drive more than 100 miles a week in the city) but also it helps more of your energy usage come from the sun rather than non-renewable sources you might be indirectly pulling from the wall.

Rule35 6y ago
Bus roofs are much better for solar than compact cars and you have a use for that incidental power in a way a car does not. As for the car, I imagine people will burn the energy and more by turning on the air conditioning when they get into their hot car that they intentionally parked in the sun. Did you glue(/etc) the panels to the roof or did you have to mount them on standoffs?
- kamranjon 6y ago
  I used VHB tape underneath and Eternabond tape over seams to prevent wind from getting underneath - each 60w panel is 2-3 pounds so very light compared to more common panels that need to be structurally mounted to the frame.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    Sounds pretty nice and fairly foolproof. I remember seeing my first solar panel leaning against an old blue and white school bus at a music festival somewhere on the west coast, decades ago. They had a bunch of old auto batteries for storage.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > turning on the air conditioning You could cool it a bit with a Stirling engine and get a little more power from the overheated interior. ;-)
  - nomel 6y ago
    And you could use some of the extra heat in hot air balloons to offset the weight of all the Stirling engines.
flavius29663 6y ago
> an induction cook top You make it sound like you're using a lot of power in that bus, but an induction cook top is at most 2-3 KW. That is 4 horse power. If you want to crawl at 5 mph that might be enough (but not for a skoolie anyway). Cars have a huge power-plant under the hood. 100kW per car, at least. All the cars in a city have far more power than the power plant that supplies the city. Think 10k cars (town)= 1 GW. That is a nuclear reactor... All the cars in the US, 275 million vehicles, at an average of 100KW, have a combined power of 27.5 TW. The total installed electrical power plants in the US are around 0.5 TW. The whole world has only 6 TW of installed power plants. Cars need a lot of power...

jquery 6y ago

Did you click the link?

deftnerd 6y ago

One possible use case of solar panels on a car in bright and hot environments would be running the air blower to continually replace the interior air with the exterior air in order to maintain a reasonable temperature. It's not uncommon in the south for temperatures to exceed 140f inside of the car.