Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge battery during the day

Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by biztos on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:48AM (#20960044)

Also, treadmills aren't powered by the people on them, but rather use a lot of electricity to move the tread (and usually a tiny bit more for the electronics).

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by narrator on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:56AM (#20960080)

They have self-powered treadmills. They're not very popular though: https://www.woodway.com/products/curve/

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by faceplanted on Friday September 13, 2019 @05:13AM (#20960453)

Yeah, they're really weird an uncomfortable until you get used to them, so people just see them as worse treadmills.

All I really want is a stationary bike that powers a fan pointing at you to cool you down because I'm a sweaty bastard.

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by usrusr on Friday September 13, 2019 @07:45AM (#20961189)

That has been done many times. Products like Racermate Wind Load Simulator in the 1970ies, more recently the CycleOps Wind or the Lemond Revolution. In fact, all "trainer" devices where a regular bike is attached for indoor use are still colloquially called "turbos", in fierce defiance of Elon Musk's sudden love for semantic precision.

They all suffered the same fate: when the hundreds of watts a well-trained athlete will produce during interval training is put into air movement, the noise is just unbearable. Much quieter setups are possible with more direct conversion to heat and even there, noise is still the dominant product metric.

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