Having said that, if you throw in the required safety features and basic creature comforts of a modern car that's going to add a lot of weight but I wouldn't be surprised if such a purely solar-powered car could reach ~30MPH (with a 0-30 time of like 30 seconds =)
With the right balance of batteries-to-weight I wouldn't be surprised if you only needed to charge the car for like 8 hours to get 100 miles of range at highway driving speeds (on a sunny day with solar assist). The 1000-mile range is probably only possible if you're doing like 30MPH with the wind at your back with the sun beating down the entire time.
Has no one done the math on this? Isn't it clearly a horrible idea, based on how much energy is available from the sun over a few square meters if car, versus the amount of energy cars use?
I guess if you live in the desert, and every week you park your car for 6 days and drive 1 day.
We have a roof top solar array that does peak 3500 Watts. Its not unsubstantial. But with the electric car (say about 4 miles/kwh) , we estimated about 12 miles of charge per day.
Depending on the specific use case, it may not be terrible.
I drive a Nissan Leaf. It gets 5.5 mi per kWh in the summer, 4.8 in the winter. My commute is about 7 miles 1-way. So less than 3kWh used daily assuming I just commute.
They have a 1kW solar panel on their car. If I had a car with the efficiency of my Leaf that charged from a 1kW panel every day, it's conceivable that for my specific use case I would rarely ever charge.
That said I don't think my case is typical and I am not a large enough market segment to cater to. Nor would I ever trade my dirt-cheap Leaf for whatever exorbitant price these things will cost.
Yes but with regenerative breaking, the additional wind resistance is probably a bigger problem above 35 mph.
One trick is to swap out the old 12V lead-acid battery they insist on sticking in electric cars with modern LiFePO4 ones to immediately save 20-25 pounds. Aluminum or alloy wheels might save another 50+ pounds if the car doesn't already have them. So it's conceivable to carry one or two 50 pound solar panels for free. An inverter and additional batteries to buffer the charge will add some weight though, since most electric cars have the artificial limitation that they can't charge while driving.
An electric car doesn't need an inverter, it can charge directly off the produced DC.
Nor does it particularly need a "whole assembly" for mounting etc, as it would be built directly into the roof of the car. It may well be that using a solar panel to replace the metal skin of the car will turn out to be equal or less weight than it otherwise would be, though of course much more expensive.
Not necessarily. I'm not particularly familiar with the weight of the metal skins of cars, but it doesn't seem obvious that a solar panel is heavier than the metal it would be replacing.
A typical 1kW panel weighs about 40lbs, of which about 9lbs is the actual silicon producing the energy, and the rest is the protective glass, silicon backing, and structural material around the edges. It seems to me that if the panel is specially made to fit into a car roof as-manufacturered in place of a metal roof, a lot of that wouldn't be needed as it would be built into the roof anyway, and the added panel weight would be pretty negligible.
The DC produced by the panel can also be directly used to charge the battery, no need for inverters.
> I guess if you live in the desert, and every week you park your car for 6 days and drive 1 day.
I live in the high (semi) desert in northern New Mexico, and for myself and a lot of my neighbors, that's precisely the situation we're in.
Doesn't mean we would drop $255k on a car, however. For that kind of money, I could have a ground mount array plus batteries that could provide enough juice to recharge a conventional EV in a couple of hours.
So it looks like the site pushes solar as a huge benefit but, if you look closer, they are actually being clear its not "unlimited range because sun", its just a boost on top of the plug in charging.
Specs say "up to 70km" of additional solar range per day; which I'm assuming is perfect alignment of the sun with the panels for the whole day. So realistically it'd be 10km (or 3%ish of the total plugin range) if its a cloudless day and you park in full sun (this is a wild guess but seems realistic).
If you ask me, its not a huge boost, but its more than I would have expected.
One section says it averages 1000km per charge based on 50km city driving per day. Another section says the battery itself has a range of 625km (city?) and 560km highway. So that would suggest that just 375km came from the solar, or 18.75km per day.
Seems more likely that "up to 70km" refers to a full day with full sun at an ideal location and time of year, not a full day with the car mounted on a solar tracking system.
That would roughly match what Aptera is claiming. Aptera has a more radical design, but looks like it might have less panel area.
I once saw a concept car that touted a solar roof, not for charging the battery (Although it did that, albeit only slightly) but for running the AC off free electricity. It seemed like a really great idea for a hot summer day.
Really, if the solar panels do enough to let me run the radio and maybe charge a phone... that's pretty good. Where I live, I need to have a car, and if that car can double as an emergency source of power, all the better.
That said, the price tag is way too high, but it would be great of some of the ideas this car represents found their way into more modest vehicles.
For those wanting a solar EV that costs far less than 250K euros, Aptera sounds promising and is planning a $26K USD price point. https://aptera.us/vehicle/
No hate on panels, the engineering claims just come pretty close to not passing the sniff test.
I did a bit of math once to work out if panels could power my (future) Cybertruck and it wasn't even close.
So maybe they have very efficient panels and the car is very light? But the Lightyear One as described on the (marketing) site is not obviously possible.
It's less to solar panels and more to poor use of solar panels and not wanting charlatans to sour solar panels for useful things by trying to scam people with them.
For this price you'd be better off buying a luxury ev, getting a new roof on your house and installing solar there. you'd have money left over and be able to actually put a meaningful charge on your car using solar that way.
This comment is spot on. Configuring the most expensive EV I could think of (Porche Taycan Turbo S) with all the options I could easily add comes to about $225K USD. That leaves ~$30K USD for a solar install to match the price of the Lightyear..
FWIW the appeal would be for those who can’t get their own roofs (aka majority of worlds population). The price point is likely to capture the initial hype.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the car itself is more like recumbent bicycle - ultra efficient vehicle with solar on top.
Even if it only gives you 20% of your commute, or 10 miles per day or w/e, what's wrong with that? It is better than burning a fossil fuel, also better than burning a fossil fuel far away, transporting the energy and pretending it's clean now ...
If I put some rechargeable D batteries in a hybrid car and let you plug it in and charge them (for 1 kWh of storage, say) at around 10x the cost of a non-plugin-hybrid, you'd be upset if I advertised that as a plugin hybrid car, right? It is, but it's not. Same with the solar panels on this thing.
A car that passively recharges using solar is always superior to one that doesn't. I don't care if it only charges 5 miles per day. Just the fact that if you're stranded just a few miles from help, or to stave off charge losses when parked for a long time, or to power connected car features when it's off without draining drive battery, all make this make sense, and every EV should have at least a consideration for a solar panel on the hood and roof if not a glass roof.
Tesla already considered this and they came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth it at all. Made the cars more expensive too, which is highlighted by the fact this car costs $255,000.
Depends on the use case. I have a house and garage where I can park and charge my car, and use the car primarily in town, so it makes more sense to put the solar panels on the house (with a battery if needed) than on the car. The car doesn't have to lug them around everywhere (decreasing efficiency), I can use the electricity for multiple purposes, and the panels will likely outlive the car itself.
On the other hand, if you live in an apartment and park somewhere that doesn't provide charging, then panels could extend your range such that you only have to use a public charger every couple of weeks rather than a couple of times per week.
If you do a lot of long out of town trips, the extra range might out-weight the loss in range from extra weight of the panels. Hard to say.
However, in no case are the benefits worth the $250k cost.
Plus the sun is really hard on car paint and interiors. It's part of why people prefer covered parking or garages. Thought at $255k maybe they've used way, way more UV- and heat-resistant materials than most cars do.
Wow....I was expecting $50k-$60k. I have no idea how they expect this car to sell unless they're taking the boutique "roadster" approach that Tesla did to get a foot in the market.
The difference between this and the Roadster is that, the Roadster was cool, this is...goofy looking and practical.
I can see this appealing to the "hyper-miler" crowd, but that's not the crowd that would want to or could drop six figures on a car.
My car only gets to 60mph (~96kmph) in 10.5s, had it for 10 years (bought new), seems fine so far. Rarely have to floor it. It is a pretty common one too.
Another high-tech car company that thinks replacing all the dashboard controls with a big touchscreen is a good idea. How is having to stare at a screen while using fine motor control in the middle of driving a good idea?
Rear-view cameras are neat, but the one time I tried one I found rapidly switching focus between a car 50 feet ahead and a screen 1 foot away to be rather tiring for my eyes.
Maybe I'm just not the target market for this sort of thing.
I dropped a new cheap Android head unit into my partner's 2011 Civic and having Android Auto is such a massive upgrade that really breathes new life into the car. That being said, there's definitely issues with it.
It's VERY bright at nighttime, which I think could probably be fixed with an OLED panel and working ambient light sensor. Additionally the volume controls are capacitive buttons to the left of the display. I've seriously considered modding in a manual volume knob because of how annoying it is to adjust while trying to pay attention to the road.
I can't even imagine having to adjust things like windows, windshield wipers, or climate control all with a touch screen.
Model 3 owner. It really doesn't present a safety situation for me. I glance at the screen for speed and maps as you would a dashboard. I use the click wheels on the steering wheel to adjust music, volume and autopilot speed.
It's super fun when parked to have the big screen and play games with the kids, it adds a ton of bonding time that would otherwise be not quite as fun.
I wouldn't mind a physical wheel similar to the newer Ford Explorer's where a rotatable wheel is affixed over the touch screen so that it feels like it's part of the touch screen.
At the equator, at noon, with no clouds every square meter of surface of the planet gets ~1400 watts of solar. Current top of the line panels are ~21% efficient. Let's call it 25%. A typical car's footprint is 4.6x1.8 meters. Let's assume it has no windshield and can be perfectly tiled with panels, all facing the sun perfectly. Let's even round the size up to 5x2 meters. Let's assume 100% charging efficiency, even!
That means that BEST CASE we have 5x2 = 10 m^2 of area, receiving 1400x.25 W of power each, so we are collecting 3.5KW of power.
A typical EV gets 7km per KWh
So that means that per hour of charging in the most perfect sun, with the world's most amazing panels, using the world's most efficient charger and battery, for a car that is quite oversized and all covered with panels buys you .... 24.5 km of driving.
A little further north, add in some clouds, remove windshield area since that part needs to be transparent, account for inefficiencies, and angles, maybe you get 5 km of driving per hour of charging during the day, if you're lucky...
Yeah.. i call bullshit on this being anything more than a gimmick
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadFYI: Solar-powered race cars can go 88km/h: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-technology/world%C...
Having said that, if you throw in the required safety features and basic creature comforts of a modern car that's going to add a lot of weight but I wouldn't be surprised if such a purely solar-powered car could reach ~30MPH (with a 0-30 time of like 30 seconds =)
With the right balance of batteries-to-weight I wouldn't be surprised if you only needed to charge the car for like 8 hours to get 100 miles of range at highway driving speeds (on a sunny day with solar assist). The 1000-mile range is probably only possible if you're doing like 30MPH with the wind at your back with the sun beating down the entire time.
I guess if you live in the desert, and every week you park your car for 6 days and drive 1 day.
I drive a Nissan Leaf. It gets 5.5 mi per kWh in the summer, 4.8 in the winter. My commute is about 7 miles 1-way. So less than 3kWh used daily assuming I just commute.
They have a 1kW solar panel on their car. If I had a car with the efficiency of my Leaf that charged from a 1kW panel every day, it's conceivable that for my specific use case I would rarely ever charge.
That said I don't think my case is typical and I am not a large enough market segment to cater to. Nor would I ever trade my dirt-cheap Leaf for whatever exorbitant price these things will cost.
One trick is to swap out the old 12V lead-acid battery they insist on sticking in electric cars with modern LiFePO4 ones to immediately save 20-25 pounds. Aluminum or alloy wheels might save another 50+ pounds if the car doesn't already have them. So it's conceivable to carry one or two 50 pound solar panels for free. An inverter and additional batteries to buffer the charge will add some weight though, since most electric cars have the artificial limitation that they can't charge while driving.
Nor does it particularly need a "whole assembly" for mounting etc, as it would be built directly into the roof of the car. It may well be that using a solar panel to replace the metal skin of the car will turn out to be equal or less weight than it otherwise would be, though of course much more expensive.
A typical 1kW panel weighs about 40lbs, of which about 9lbs is the actual silicon producing the energy, and the rest is the protective glass, silicon backing, and structural material around the edges. It seems to me that if the panel is specially made to fit into a car roof as-manufacturered in place of a metal roof, a lot of that wouldn't be needed as it would be built into the roof anyway, and the added panel weight would be pretty negligible.
The DC produced by the panel can also be directly used to charge the battery, no need for inverters.
I live in the high (semi) desert in northern New Mexico, and for myself and a lot of my neighbors, that's precisely the situation we're in.
Doesn't mean we would drop $255k on a car, however. For that kind of money, I could have a ground mount array plus batteries that could provide enough juice to recharge a conventional EV in a couple of hours.
Specs say "up to 70km" of additional solar range per day; which I'm assuming is perfect alignment of the sun with the panels for the whole day. So realistically it'd be 10km (or 3%ish of the total plugin range) if its a cloudless day and you park in full sun (this is a wild guess but seems realistic).
If you ask me, its not a huge boost, but its more than I would have expected.
That would roughly match what Aptera is claiming. Aptera has a more radical design, but looks like it might have less panel area.
EEVblog 1480 - Lightyear Zero Solar Powered Electric Car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIokNnjuam8
Really, if the solar panels do enough to let me run the radio and maybe charge a phone... that's pretty good. Where I live, I need to have a car, and if that car can double as an emergency source of power, all the better.
That said, the price tag is way too high, but it would be great of some of the ideas this car represents found their way into more modest vehicles.
But few people will want to drop XX,000 for a car that they have to leave outside all the time.
Speaking as a person who parks his 2007 Camry under a tree every day.
I did a bit of math once to work out if panels could power my (future) Cybertruck and it wasn't even close.
So maybe they have very efficient panels and the car is very light? But the Lightyear One as described on the (marketing) site is not obviously possible.
For this price you'd be better off buying a luxury ev, getting a new roof on your house and installing solar there. you'd have money left over and be able to actually put a meaningful charge on your car using solar that way.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the car itself is more like recumbent bicycle - ultra efficient vehicle with solar on top.
Even if it only gives you 20% of your commute, or 10 miles per day or w/e, what's wrong with that? It is better than burning a fossil fuel, also better than burning a fossil fuel far away, transporting the energy and pretending it's clean now ...
On the other hand, if you live in an apartment and park somewhere that doesn't provide charging, then panels could extend your range such that you only have to use a public charger every couple of weeks rather than a couple of times per week.
If you do a lot of long out of town trips, the extra range might out-weight the loss in range from extra weight of the panels. Hard to say.
However, in no case are the benefits worth the $250k cost.
The difference between this and the Roadster is that, the Roadster was cool, this is...goofy looking and practical.
I can see this appealing to the "hyper-miler" crowd, but that's not the crowd that would want to or could drop six figures on a car.
Rear-view cameras are neat, but the one time I tried one I found rapidly switching focus between a car 50 feet ahead and a screen 1 foot away to be rather tiring for my eyes.
Maybe I'm just not the target market for this sort of thing.
It's VERY bright at nighttime, which I think could probably be fixed with an OLED panel and working ambient light sensor. Additionally the volume controls are capacitive buttons to the left of the display. I've seriously considered modding in a manual volume knob because of how annoying it is to adjust while trying to pay attention to the road.
I can't even imagine having to adjust things like windows, windshield wipers, or climate control all with a touch screen.
It's super fun when parked to have the big screen and play games with the kids, it adds a ton of bonding time that would otherwise be not quite as fun.
I wouldn't mind a physical wheel similar to the newer Ford Explorer's where a rotatable wheel is affixed over the touch screen so that it feels like it's part of the touch screen.
I find it incredibly helpful and not distracting at all.
That means that BEST CASE we have 5x2 = 10 m^2 of area, receiving 1400x.25 W of power each, so we are collecting 3.5KW of power.
A typical EV gets 7km per KWh
So that means that per hour of charging in the most perfect sun, with the world's most amazing panels, using the world's most efficient charger and battery, for a car that is quite oversized and all covered with panels buys you .... 24.5 km of driving.
A little further north, add in some clouds, remove windshield area since that part needs to be transparent, account for inefficiencies, and angles, maybe you get 5 km of driving per hour of charging during the day, if you're lucky...
Yeah.. i call bullshit on this being anything more than a gimmick