Basically its a roof rack solar panel with a battery inside (includes AC outlet), extra fold out panels that cover the length of the car, and a charge cable for the car. They’re about $5000 USD and are shipping the first ones out in Q3 this year.
As someone who lives in an appt and commutes, this would make an electric vehicle much more viable as there is no charging stations in my building or at my work. I saw this and immediately began researching what vehicle models would be coming to Canada in 2028.
Cool idea, I wish it were more practical. The site says the panels total 1100W of solar panels and it includes a 2kWh battery, sounds like it can store a little power to pass along. But at 1100W it’s going to take more than one day’s worth of sunlight to fully charge even a small EV battery. From what I’ve seen it takes about 16-18 hours to charge a 20kWh small EV battery on a Level 1 charger (120v) which would be in a similar ballpark to the max output of this solar array.
If they could somehow beef this up about 3x as much output, you’d have something very useful IMO.
Who is emptying an entire battery every day though? For low distance usage it might not be too bad.
Well it would be easy to use up a small EV battery like I was describing (20kWh) but the “normal” EVs these days have around 100kWh batteries so you can just multiply the charging time x 5 to estimate a “normal” EV’s charging time on this solar roof.
Other than the extra weight, larger battery doesn’t matter.
If you had a 500MWh battery and it takes half a year to charge it doesn’t matter for the solar panel if you only actually use 5kWh a day.
Depends on the car. My PHEV minivan only does 30 miles at best on electric. It isn’t hard to do that just getting kids to all their activities in the morning. I installed a level 2 charger because then we have the evening activities and couldn’t get enough charge.
Meanwhile my car gets 200 some miles on a charge so even the days I use more power than level 1 can restore in a day the next day is sure to be less and so it gets to full charge.
Just looked it up, sounds like Americans drive way more. In the UK I cycle around as much as the average
lazy fuckperson drives.Stats for typical driving distances are comically low. Quite a lot of people would drive distances below 1km.
It’s about 3 miles round trip to my nearest store with some decent hills and you have to ride on a highway. There is a back way to the store but it’s being redone and it’s closed right now which will make it safer to bike. Before the construction and when I was single with no kids I walked to the store every day to pick up stuff for dinner taking the back way. Now even when it reopens I’ll still probably drive because I usually have to take at least 1 of my 2 young children. If I had an ebike I’d probably take that because I’m not riding my bike up the hills with my kids in tow.
I cycle to work and that is 8km each way. Takes about 20-25 mins depending on how much I have to wait for car traffic and if I can filter past them.
Looking around at some websites of companies that sell solar panels, the average expected amount from a stationary solar panel seems to be about 6 Wh per watt of solar panel capacity, per day. At 1.1 kW, that’s about 6.6 kWh per day. And at 3.5 miles (5.6 km) per kWh, you’re only looking at about 23 miles (37 km) per day, if you’re also not driving in the middle of the day, and can actually offload the energy from the solar system battery to the actual car battery.
You’re probably better off trying to charge a regular solar generator with about 6 kWh of storage and 1 kW of stationary solar panels, and just charging your car every night with that. Looking around at the leading brands of solar generators available in the US, that looks like it would cost about $3000-3500, significantly cheaper than this thing.
This is the feedback I was looking for!
1100W is a charge rate of 1.1kWh per hour.
So a typical car with 70kWh battery, will take about 70-80 hours to charge from 0 to 100%.
If you’re camping, that can be plenty. You won’t run down to zero getting to the camp site. And you don’t need to be at 100% to leave. It’ll give you ~10kWh a day. You’ll be able to charge for several days. When you’re ready to leave you’ll have plenty to get to a real charger.
That 1100w is probably the nominal output of the system when the panels are facing the sun. With em draped over the car its gonna be a fair bit less.
70-80 hrs assuming the earth doesn’t revolve. Weeks.
Yah I assumed they wouldn’t be consecutive. We are talking about solar power on Earth.