Yes, but with a light and efficient vehicle, along with enough area covered in solar, it should be able to get you about 15 miles of free travel when left out on a sunny day. It has a battery. It isn’t just running on sunshine and lollipops.
I’m not believing they’ll get even close to that in a production vehicle that’s US street legal.
The body weighs around 360kg, with a 60kwh battery it supposedly weighs around 800kg (the smallest and lightest option is 25kwh), with a drag coefficient of 0.13.
In comparison to some of the most efficient cars - the Hyundai Ioniq 6 is around 1,860kg with a drag coefficient of 0.21. Tesla Model 3 is around 1760kg with a drag coefficient of 0.219.
It’s going to be a whole lot more efficient than the average car just based on these numbers.
Now it depends on how much of the car’s surface will be covered by the solar panel and what’s the panel’s efficiency.
They are skirting the “street legal” and safety stuff by making an electric motorcycle instead of a car. Months (years?) ago I read something about how they are planning to tackle helmet laws in court because of this. Accident safety features are heavy, this thing is going to be a death trap on US roads in order to be as light as possible.
Overall I think that’s the right move, but I wouldn’t get in rush hour traffic in this thing.
Yeah, this is why it’s dumb. When is a parked car parked ideally to capture sunlight? Just put the money into solar panels on a building or in a field, charge your car when parked, and you have a much better and cheaper product. The solar panels on the building can also be used to power other things, unlike the car. It’s such a stupid idea and will be very expensive to get custom panels for the car that aren’t super fragile and also efficient. Just spend that money and larger cheap panels. This is purely to get VC funding and nothing more. It’s a waste of time and energy.
In america? Litterally everywhere. Even driving down the highway would get trickle charging.
If your expecting to fully charge from the panels, youre gonna have a bad day. But every extra mile would overcome the cost over its lifetime.
Again, I said ideally. When will it ever outperform solar on a rooftop of the same size? How much more size could you get for the price?
It would never overcome its opportunity cost, even if it recovers it’s cost (which you’re speculating on and have no idea of the cost). You could spend the extra money for a solar car, or spend the money for rooftop solar. Rooftop solar will always outperform it for the price, so you have a negative opportunity cost.
I mean, it’d be cool to get a couple miles of range here and there without having to plug in. Could make for a nice little errand vehicle in a smaller city where there aren’t trees or tall buildings to block light and you just park in a driveway or apartment parking lot. If say the battery itself would be big enough for an 80 mile range, I could see some people never having to plug this car in.
It’ll come down to price, of course. If it’s cheap, it could be cool and useful. If it’s expensive, it’s a novelty and would have no practical reasoning to be purchased.
The base model has a 250mi range, and the biggest boi battery is estimated to get close to an 800mi range. The batteries are almost half the size of other EV batteries because of how efficient this vehicle is.
It will not be cheap. It’s going to be the price of an EV + the price of custom shaped solar + the price of R&D + the price of being a niche product and not having the efficiency of scale. It’ll be a novelty without any doubt.
15 miles a day under ideal conditions isn’t really a significant amount, most EVs could run for multiple weeks without being charged under those conditions.
That’s 100 free miles a week. Sure, most people will need to charge it anyway, but that’s still 100 free miles a week.
But I don’t think it’s a good idea. It would be more efficient to just put the same solar panels in your roof, where they don’t contribute to the car’s weight, don’t force your to park in sunlight instead of indoor parking or garage, and whose output can be used for charging the car OR for anything else as needed.
It’s not any more free than any other EV. it still uses energy. That energy can only be used for the car though. Put some solar on your house and it can charge your car (not free, the price of the panels same as the car). It will also be more efficient because it can be placed ideally, unlike the car. It’ll also be cheaper for a larger area because it can take advantage of cheap standard panels instead of expensive custom ones.
