Comment by defrost

7 hours ago

You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.

Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.

* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo

Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below

> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.

is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.

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defrost

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embedding-shape  6 hours ago

Ok, so lets say we didn't want 100% of the energy to come from those "self-sustainable panels on the car", but rather N%, so we keep most everything as-is, except switching all the outside body/chassi panels for solar panels, how much N% could we recover from that? Could it change so someone goes from needing to charge once every 3 days to once every 2 weeks lets say? Together with re-generative breaking, maybe it could at least have some impact.

  • thechao  6 hours ago

    You're off by an order of magnitude. It's a few hundred watts; an EV is consuming 10s of kilowatts. (Ignore the watt-watt/hour sloppiness, pls.) To charge my car 60% would take about 2 months. Ambient needs (battery cooling) would eat up more than I'd get back. At best it extends idle sit time.