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Or you could cover every residential building and parking lot's rooftop with solar panels and have charging stations for cars, and low cost electricity for the

by gt565k 6y ago

Or you could cover every residential building and parking lot's rooftop with solar panels and have charging stations for cars, and low cost electricity for the entire block, neighborhood, and city. This problem of "energy" in particular electricity, can be solved, but requires buy in from millions of different parties (HOAs, building owners, real estate developers). Unless the law changes where you can compel / force these stake-holders to adopt solar panels, change will never come at scale in urban areas. It's possible, it just requires so much buy in from so many individual entities.

dmos62 6y ago
Question is whether the panels on the car's roof or on the building's roof can be installed cheaper, and how the installation+maintainance / energy output ratio compares.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Don't discount the fact that a car may not have direct sunlight where it's parked, particularly a city car with high buildings surrounding it. I could park a solar panel in my driveway and it wouldn't receive direct sunlight until about 1pm. At 1pm my south facing rooftop solar array is at 97% of peak output, and by 2pm it's down to 82% and falls off pretty sharply after that. At some point in the afternoon the shadow cast from across the street would block that direct sunlight. According to their specs, the car goes 255km on a 35kWh pack which is ~7.286km/Wh. It says it can produce up to 245km of range which is roughly 33.6kWh a week or 4.8kWh a day at best. In my case, it would be closer to half that value at best (2.4kWh), we've been having overcast days and my array has been outputting half it's normal capacity (1.2kWh). That's over 60km of range which would probably work for me but is 1 day's commute for a lot of people.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    Also I bet the efficiency numbers are for the panel receiving optimal direct sunlight not the high angle light it's going to get because it's on the side of a car nearly vertical.
albertgoeswoof 6y ago
why not both
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Weight, complexity, cost, lack of freedom of paint color/wrap, and complexity/time/cost of repairs after minor collisions??
  - ianai 6y ago
    Per the Aptera guys, the weight, cost, and complexity add isn’t much steeper than just the average cost of custom paint. As others have said, a central pain point of solar is installation specific and this ameliorates those problems. Heck, imagine if every apartment complex had a fleet of solar covered cars in its parking lot? Or every open air parking lot for that matter. At scale, it would add up.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Not much more expensive than custom paint isn't all that compelling in terms of economics. (Porsche's paint-to-sample program is $7K extra the last time I looked. And that's an automaker's non-standard color only, not fully custom paint.) How many cars are custom painted today? Very few because of the high cost. Vinyl wrap has largely displaced custom painting, even in motorsports (which is not a particularly budget sensitive endeavor). If the solar tech here costs consumers only what the Porsche PTS program costs, that would be the equivalent of around 35MWh of electricity generation to break-even (at a generous $0.20/kWh). That 35MWh is equivalent to around 140K miles of range that would need to be added to break-even. Sono Motors site suggests that 70 miles per week can be added. On a cash basis (without discounting), that's 2000 weeks or 38.5 years. If your local electricity is $0.10/kWh, the payback period is longer than your entire driving lifespan. If you discount the future at just 3%, it literally loses money every year. This tech is cool, but fails to be practical IMO.
bin_bash 6y ago
At least where I lived in cities it seems like I wouldn't have had much opportunity for direct sunlight parking on the street. Rooftops make a lot more sense.

by gt565k 6y ago

dmos62 6y ago

Question is whether the panels on the car's roof or on the building's roof can be installed cheaper, and how the installation+maintainance / energy output ratio compares.

cptskippy 6y ago
Don't discount the fact that a car may not have direct sunlight where it's parked, particularly a city car with high buildings surrounding it. I could park a solar panel in my driveway and it wouldn't receive direct sunlight until about 1pm. At 1pm my south facing rooftop solar array is at 97% of peak output, and by 2pm it's down to 82% and falls off pretty sharply after that. At some point in the afternoon the shadow cast from across the street would block that direct sunlight. According to their specs, the car goes 255km on a 35kWh pack which is ~7.286km/Wh. It says it can produce up to 245km of range which is roughly 33.6kWh a week or 4.8kWh a day at best. In my case, it would be closer to half that value at best (2.4kWh), we've been having overcast days and my array has been outputting half it's normal capacity (1.2kWh). That's over 60km of range which would probably work for me but is 1 day's commute for a lot of people.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  Also I bet the efficiency numbers are for the panel receiving optimal direct sunlight not the high angle light it's going to get because it's on the side of a car nearly vertical.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

why not both

sokoloff 6y ago
Weight, complexity, cost, lack of freedom of paint color/wrap, and complexity/time/cost of repairs after minor collisions??
- ianai 6y ago
  Per the Aptera guys, the weight, cost, and complexity add isn’t much steeper than just the average cost of custom paint. As others have said, a central pain point of solar is installation specific and this ameliorates those problems. Heck, imagine if every apartment complex had a fleet of solar covered cars in its parking lot? Or every open air parking lot for that matter. At scale, it would add up.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Not much more expensive than custom paint isn't all that compelling in terms of economics. (Porsche's paint-to-sample program is $7K extra the last time I looked. And that's an automaker's non-standard color only, not fully custom paint.) How many cars are custom painted today? Very few because of the high cost. Vinyl wrap has largely displaced custom painting, even in motorsports (which is not a particularly budget sensitive endeavor). If the solar tech here costs consumers only what the Porsche PTS program costs, that would be the equivalent of around 35MWh of electricity generation to break-even (at a generous $0.20/kWh). That 35MWh is equivalent to around 140K miles of range that would need to be added to break-even. Sono Motors site suggests that 70 miles per week can be added. On a cash basis (without discounting), that's 2000 weeks or 38.5 years. If your local electricity is $0.10/kWh, the payback period is longer than your entire driving lifespan. If you discount the future at just 3%, it literally loses money every year. This tech is cool, but fails to be practical IMO.

bin_bash 6y ago

At least where I lived in cities it seems like I wouldn't have had much opportunity for direct sunlight parking on the street. Rooftops make a lot more sense.