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 maxsilver on Friday September 13, 2019 @11:48AM (#20963168)

Sorry, I mixed up my units, I meant "average of ~0.7kw per hour, for 6 hours, for a total of 4.2kwh per sunlight-day". That should get you 16 miles in climates like mine, or up to 20 miles in clearer/warmer weather.

That seems like a very realistic/feasible figure. (Lightyear One's claims their prototype car can pull almost 2kw per hour (7.5 miles of charge per hour), which at 6 hours, earns you 12kWh per sunlight-day)

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by mercutio2 on Friday September 13, 2019 @12:12PM (#20963401)

Pedantic note:

It’s not “.7kW per hour”.

Watts is a measure of power, it’s already Joules/second.

You just want “.7kW”.

For 6 hours, you still won’t get 4kWh, because you need to adjust for less than ideal angle, and less than full sun days.

But if you got 3kWh on a good day, that’s still 10-12 miles of additional range.

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Re:Toyota is trying to put solar panels on a Prius to charge... by jsight on Friday September 13, 2019 @03:04PM (#20965283)

I think that is incredibly optimistic for a production vehicle. I think it is likely that production vehicles with setups like this will have one 350 Watt panel on the roof. A typical house roofmount of the same would produce ~1.5 KWh per day.

Car environments tend to be worse than that due to the angle and likely regular proximity of even mild shading. Its certainly enough to eliminate vampire drain, which is helpful at times, but I don't see how it will add an appreciable amount of mileage otherwise.

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