Comment by trhway

2 days ago

300-545 watts. Aptera gets 8 miles/KWh (to compare - my Prius and other EV cars get about 3+ miles/KWh). So they get 2.5-4.5 miles from an hour under the Sun. So 20-40 miles during the time of commute and while parked at work.

So, yes, that Trump's idea he expressed in the interview to Musk back then to plaster cars with solar panels isn't totally meaningless, at least in theory - you can have 2-3x solar panels on regular car compare to Aptera, so it would have made sense for daily commute if that plastering of the cars cost close to nothing, and unfortunately putting such thing in production would add thousands to the car cost, and given that even Musk/Tesla with their pile of cash available to dump into engineering of such a new feature haven't yet ventured into it it suggests that at least near future isn't bright for it.

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trhway

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nindalf  2 days ago

The price of solar panels isn’t static though. It might not have made sense in 2015 or 2020 or even 2025. But solar panels continue to get cheaper, so it might eventually get to a point where it’s a serious idea. Even if it costs a couple thousand extra, the panels will pay for themselves by giving you basically free commutes forever.

  • trhway  2 days ago

    mainly it isn't the price of solar panels. How do you put it on the car's curved metal panels (or you're going to redesign the car into something like Cybertruck?) without worsening aerodynamics, without much additional holes and additional weight and in the way that will hold the panels for the next 7-10 years, rain, snow or shine while these panels wouldn't get easily damaged by carwash, etc., and you also need to put all these wires in some sensible way to minimize risk of various failures and repairs and you'd have to price in additional warranty service for all that additional stuff ... so it is a large and expensive thing to put into mass production.

    >Even if it costs a couple thousand extra, the panels will pay for themselves by giving you basically free commutes forever.

    Say you get 1.5KW, 3x of best Aptera, 8 hours, 12KWh, i.e. about $3.60/day or it can be thought as a replacement of 1 gallon of gas (at 30% efficiency), still $4. Thus $1000/year. And i don't think the feature can be put into cars at $2K. More like $3-$5K optimistically.

  • walrus01  2 days ago

    Solar panels get cheaper but the total amount of square meters on a vehicle that you can cover with them remains the same. In something the size of this car if I were purchasing PV cells for it, I would be optimizing by far for STC watt per square cm, not $/watt.

    $/watt STC is more for big roof and ground mount PV financial calculations.