Solar charging ensures you only rarely have to plug it in to top it up, which is convenient. It also means that if you leave it sitting outside for long periods of time, it will be topped up rather than slightly drained when you get back to it. That convenience is not worth a lot of course but solar panels are cheap. And also, not having to pay for the electricity is nice.
E.g. my mother has a car that averages less than 3000 km/year (seriously). With this, she'd never have to plug it in (or rather visit a petrol station). My parents live in a small village and most of the trips are basically 15km round trips to a near by city. Something like this but a bit cheaper would be perfect for them and decimate their fuel expenses.
Will this cover all your needs? No of course not. But solar panels are cheap so the added cost of this convenience might be worth it.
No weight or vibration requirements, can use the electricity for your house too.
The only downside is you need to plug in.
Governments will likely be slow to implement on street charging. There is a market for something like this, if it works as well as they say - which I doubt.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.mortgagefinancegazette.com/market-news/housing/t...
[1] https://www.which.co.uk/news/2017/07/do-solar-panels-affect-...
Then you probably live in a city and would be better served by transport modes where you don't need a big upfront cost, and other expenses and hassle of owning your own vehicle. I mean bus, tram, metro rail, taxi, uber.
You can always qualify with further "what if you..." to find someone who matches this case. But by the time you're done it won't be a viable number of customers.
The cars are used to get away from crowds and from the city, to have some privacy and comfort and go out into nature.
There is black-and white reasoning about this because the maths around "what is the surface area of the car, how much charge can it generate and how far can it go on that charge" is also black-and white. And not favourable.
As the other reply says, this is not "the debate of electric cars"; this is the debate about this specific electric car design, with the solar panels on the car.
It's not talking about the current argument. It's saying the current argument shares the property of arguing against the use-cases of people outside the target demographic.
People who argue "electric cars will never be viable" (and not anyone in this thread) commonly complain about lack of supercharging speed, despite that being a feature that most people (and all initial adopters) will only use once or twice a year, if ever. This will not be a problem for a long time, as right now only ~1% of car users have an EV and that won't be a major problem until we start running out of ICE car-owning EV buyers who don't need that, which is at least at the 50% mark.
This particular car is priced quite nicely even if it came without this. So does not sound like there is a lot of extra cost.
I'm guessing manufacturers spend more on things like seat warmers or other stuff manufacturers put in cars these days. Also these things are probably more likely to break.
And if you consider the environment, imagine the energy savings over the life time of the vehicle not charging from (potentially) dirty sources. It would only be a waste if that energy wasn't used which would require you to religiously plug it in the second you stop driving.
Also, panels can be recycled (just like cars and batteries) and mostly don't contain that much nasty stuff to begin with. So, I don't see the problem here necessarily.
I can imagine this seems absurdly low for suburban America.
Otherwise, 15 min trips become 60+ ones which makes everything impossible.
People seem to think that just because things don't work where they live, that they must be impossible.
Even just getting around in inside the city, driving takes on average half the time of public transport. Shopping is much more convenient. It IS impossible to have public transport that delivers the same usefulness, speed and flexibility.
Owning a car still gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility to do what you want, when you want it. Which is not covered by car sharing at all.
I would gladly own a cheaper car only to do a weekly shopping trip and a weekly nature trip, something like 25km per week. Seems ridiculous to own a car for that short distances, but it gives a LOT of quality of life and I would gladly pay for it instead of using car sharing.
I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic.
It is both much more practical and cheaper to use bicycle or bus and metro rail for commuting; taxi, minicab, or uber for other urban journeys; and car rental for weekends away.
I get that cases may vary. it's different further out from the city. But the idea that car = freedom, always, is very silly. I owned car here once, and it was liberating to get rid of it.
It seems that you have problems with your shared transport in your area, it sucks but maybe the better solution is better shared transport, not more private cars?
I live in a big city. Not owning a car for me would be frankly insane. How would I get to work? It'd take ~2 hours with public transport only.
It is both much more practical and safer to use a car rather than a bicylce (too dangerous) or bus (cannot reach where I go) and metro rail (Have to walk an hour for nearest station) for commuting; taxi, minicab, or uber for other urban journeys; and car rental for weekends away (all are too expensive in the long run).
I get that cases may vary. it's different in other cities. But the idea that car = burden, always, is very silly. I was unable to go where I want/need to go quickly until I got a car, and it was liberating.
There, fixed it for my case. :)
Of course, YMMV. :)
That's a nice full circle. :)
Problem is people don't pay the real cost of their car, it's subsidised by free pollution
Of course. OTOH, Instead of using my car, congesting traffic and spewing smoke from my back twice everyday, I'd only use my car whenever I need it for these heavy tasks.
Then, use public transport most of the time which possibly runs on electric and do a little more walking every day.
Perfect for people like my mother would be a self driving car that you can summon to your door in a few minutes. But even calling a taxi takes half an hour+. So it would have to be faster than that.
- bus: a few times a week (if at all), because of cost efficiency
- taxi: hours, + only if you book at least a day in advance, because they’re just not sitting there waiting for a call, they’re busy towards where people are/go, which is, like, the other way.
Throw in no/unstable/limited power grid, and you double down on one of the use cases.
I can find half a dozen car sharing vehicles in a 400m radius from my house.
Urban planning does not equal trying to get everyone to live in packed apartments.
You've got 150 people in a village
Half drive, so that's 75
You've got 10% of people who want a car for this sort of distance (3000km), so that's 8. Of those chances are at least some of the time almost all of them will want to use it over the same period. Maybe you can get away with 6 or 7 cars instead of 8, with some risk, but that's not saving much, and you're adding a lot of inconvenience (car won't be in the right place), overhead, and risk (what if you need a car now and there's none available?)
If you want to tackle the externalities of the resources producing the car, tax them at the same rate as taxing other resources.
Of course that's a big village, what about a group of half a dozen isolated houses 2 miles from the village?
Why would peak load be that high, though?
Wouldn't they be even better suited to a regular electric car, parked under a roof of solar panels? The simple flat solar roof will be cheaper to make, and be a larger useful surface. And easier to replace, will keep the weather off the car, reduces car weight, etc.
It seems non trivial to me.
You seem sceptical? I've seen exactly that in a street near me, to a motor vehicle being charged up. They used a cable protector, this kind of device: https://www.kingfisherdirect.co.uk/traffic-line-hose-and-cab...
However, more permanent infrastructure would be buried below the paving. This already happens, BTW. Cities need infrastructure, that's just the fact of it. 21st century infrastructure will include fast internet and vehicle charging.
I'm not arguing against the idea that such infrastructure would be good. I'm just saying that a private person renting an apartment in a city can not reasonably be expected to slap solar panels on the roof of the building they don't own, illegally run cables over the pavement they don't own to their cars that may or may not be possible to park near the building they live in.
To them, a car that "charges itself", even significantly less efficiently, may indeed be a better solution.
Since I was out and about today, I took these pictures
The first picture shows the cable with protector, that a neighbour uses. It's not in use but you get the idea.
The second shows more permanent infrastructure - a charging port built into a lamp post. Picture taken across the road from the first. Note the logo of https://www.ubitricity.com/ and instruction sign. Sometimes I see new model LEVC taxis plugged in there.
The cable guide there is there so that prams etc can get over it without much trouble, and so that pedestrians don't trip.
The unknowns at this point are: what are people willing to pay and how much additional weight will they tolerate? And, how light and cheap can these panels be made with the technology available now? And whatever these numbers are now, they may change as public opinion, the price of energy, and technology change. It may be too early for this to be a viable product, or maybe not. It's good to see someone is trying it at least.
Also: a solar carport might be technically easier to make, but it will require building permits and probably hiring an electrician and manual labor assembling the structure and so on. And some people don't own the land they park their car on, and many people drive to work and park their car in a lot that either doesn't have solar roofs over the cars or the ones that do use that power to cut down on the company's power bills.
"worth" here implies the third factor that you didn't explicitly mention: how much power you get off them. And "69 miles per week of charging" is pretty small, hardly worth it unless it's extremely cheap in vehicle cost and weight.
You're not wrong with the qualifiers "people using their cars once or twice a week to drive 10km to do groceries" and "some people don't own the land they park their car on" but each qualifier of the prospective customer greatly decreases the potential market size. Combined with a qualifier that they must be without good access to shared transport (so not in a big city, but not on their own land); then you might be looking at corner cases, not a viable market.
While the technology isn't there yet, it seems likely that this will eventually be the case.
3 million cars in the UK do less than 3000 miles a year, 1.8 million do less than 2000.
*I only drive because, with no footpath most of the way, it's dangerous to walk and I would not feel safe cycling (the road attracts many idiot drivers because there is almost zero chance of encountering police).
> As a back of the envelope calculation, if you covered the ~2.44 m2 roof of a VW ID3 with solar panels you'd probably see somewhere in the region of 244 kWh / year (based on typical UK solar panel generation per year - this would be more in a sunny place). At 4.3 miles/kWh that gives you just over 1000 miles / year of self charged driving.
The 4.3 is pretty optimistic, most cars are rated around 3 miles per kwh, but I digress. Optimistically it'd mean 1000 miles per year or 19 miles per week, or 2.7 miles per day.
I'd say firstly, this is already a niche category. The average car drives 30 miles a day, or more than 10x what this would charge under optimistic mileage.
Second, the extra weight would likely make this comparison even worse.
Third, not really cost-efficient, either, to install a complete solar system for every 2.5 metres. Much of the cost isn't in the panels but in the system around it.
Fourth, I doubt even the 69 mile a week category of people will still mostly have personal cars within 5-10 years. The flexible car rental market is taking off. In Amsterdam for example there's now about 100 thousand users of Sharenow alone, one of the multiple car rental providers, on a population of about 800 thousand people. Anyone who drives 69 miles a week or 10 miles a day, is typically better off renting. At a speed of 20 miles per hour you're looking at 30 minutes or 6 euros per day for your complete car usage costs, i.e. 180 a month. That's less than most cars (300-400 a month) cost in insurance, deprecation, taxes, fuel and parking in Europe. These companies are expanding sufficiently to allow most people in this low-usage group to do away with a personal car within 5 years I think. By the time these solarpanel cars could even start coming online, it's likely that most cars will have increased usage rates and that these solar panels won't even power a few percent of the mileage.
What matters is the lowest 25% percentile. Getting 25% of the market is enough.
New technology is always a crapshoot, some pay off, some don't; but without a long term view we would still be driving a horse and buggy.
It's not short sighted thinking: Most people who use this site can do basic arithmetic.
The solar radiance under AM1.5 (which approximates the surface of the earth at the latitude of Europe, the US, or China) is around 1000 kW/m^2. The very best multi-bandgap solar cells in the lab today are about 47% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. The very best DC-DC converters have about 95% efficiency in practice.
That means upper bound on energy production is about 445 W/m^2. On a sunny day. At noon. In June. For a panel directly facing the sun. With no shade.
That means you need slightly more than 3 m^2 of sun-facing panels at noon to achieve just the charging rate of a basic 120V North American household plug (1.44 kW from a NEMA 5-15, to be precise).
That means you need well over 3 m^2 of body-conforming panel to achieve that rate at noon. And that's the best case given infinite money. And production at other times of the day will be lower (even if you assume the car is parked in the middle of a flat desert).
Since the sun moves throughout the day, leaving such a car in the sun all day will only charge it about as much as charging from household plug for about 3-5 hours. Showing that is left as an exercise to the reader.
Industry experts thought the iPhone was a gimmick.
I still remember "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame"
I’m pretty sure this car can be plugged in too. In fact it has bidirectional charging, so a parking lot of these things could (theoretically) be connected into a huge solar system charging all the cars
Panels must be positioned to face the sun, must be unobscured, must be in daylight during prime hours to make it worthwhile. Car roofs are often none of those things.
You want car parks turned into solar stations? Then mount them in the car park over the cars, angled at the sun permanently. Its a simple change, cheaper, and works many many times better. And gets crap off your car making it lighter and reducing drag.
This is an under-appreciated point by the solar car advocates.
In order to get anywhere close to a practical self-charging car, you have to put panels on an area equivalent to covering the entire surface of the car (including the windows!).
For a conventionally-shaped car, approximately 1/3rd to 2/3rds of those panels (depending on the orientation of the car w.r.t. the sun) are producing essentially zero electricity. Either because they are actually facing away from the sun, or just at such an extreme angle to the sun.
In other words, you get between 50% to 200% more power by taking those panels off the car and slapping them on a roof. The difference in practice will be much greater in urban environments because buildings tend to shade the street (where cars park).
You don't think the same would happen if wide spread adoption of solar started happening?
Arguing: "Technology isn't good enough yet, so we shouldn't try"... how do you expect to make it good enough?
A car having anything remotely close to useful solar charging requires so many goldilocks conditions to be just right that it's not worth the complexity, and it's better to invest equivalent resources into more practical solutions.
Just to make my point really clear, This whole thread is generally arguing: Don't do innovative things, because there are other known (non-innovative) things you could do.
Cars that charge themselves in the sun is a no brainer, is it going to replace needing to ever charge them, not yet... But if we don't try we won't improve that technology.
The ICE brought about big gains for its use case even as a prototype; ICE cars don't produce poop and they wear out a lot less quickly than a horse. In comparison, flying cars or amphibious cars never really made it off the ground in a big way, because the "innovation" there resulted in a hybrid machine that did two jobs poorly and impractically, rather than having two specialized machines.
If it is really easy to point out inherent problems, like, say, the fact that most of the surface area on a car is not generally oriented at an angle to the sun conducive for generating electricity, and those aren't problems that would be solved by "innovation", why try to squeeze water from a stone?
The same thing won't happen with solar, it needs active use in novel areas. Cars are out in the sun, why not collect it? Panels aren't exactly a super rare resource, we could and should make piles of these and stick them to everything, it's literally free electricity and basically 0 maintenance.
Are they? Cars spend a fair amount of time under things that would block sunlight; there are garages in all sorts of buildings from your bare-bones detached house garage to multistory affairs, and even if they're outside they're often parked under trees, or in streets and lots shaded by buildings. So it makes already intermittent solar even more situational.
In fact, in hot climates, people take care to park their cars in shade, because the last thing people want is for their car to be baking in the sun.
Or the other alternative, the shipping of petroleum on huge trucks to millions of locations.
But yeah, I'd draw the line at solar panels on car roof tops too... the excess is too much.
What interest me in designs like this is, can it receive sufficient power to overcome battery maintenance in cold weather even while sitting
A Tesla can charge more than this in an hour.