Comment by 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.
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.
Damn, you're absolutely right. The aerodynamics alone kills this idea.
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.