Quote:
Originally Posted by **********
You are right yet again. Best to not even try, right man? Give up! Thats what they should do. The nerve of some people trying to make the world a better place.
Solar Panels on cars would not work very well because the panels need to take up alot of space to charge a car's batteries in a reasonable time. If roads were solar, the energy they capture could charge cars while they drive on it via Induction.
The technology has been around for a long time but its getting cheap enough to do more and more things with.
(From Scientific American) |
The panels are in the $1/watt threshold now, so they are not very expensive to buy them outright.
As far as panels on cars.. it's just not gonna happen because the car body would have the panels at all different angles.
Now my Telsa idea was to use their battery/drive system and build a AWD van like the old school VW Westy's. You could fit probably 500w on the roof which wouldn't keep it charged as a closed loop system, but 500w is enough to charge the batteries back up a pretty good amount.
With something like that, you could drive the car to work doing a average commute and then leave the car parked in the sun charging. By the end of the day it would probably be fully charged again. Meaning it's not going to be enough solar to keep you driving forever, but it would add quite a bit of supplement charging for the average city dweller.
Something like that could very well work in the southern states of the US where there is a lot of sunny days. It would however have to be some sort of van or SUV to get enough flat roof space for the solar.