Casual Conversation
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Edit: I removed the HELP and extra question mark from the end since I've now left it be outside and don't need a advice. I thought the cross post would include the body text from the first post on [email protected] so I guess I accidentally left out all the other pictures and additional info, oops
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Just like what the internet told me, what one buys, including books they don't read, actually speaks more about themselves. Not in a negative manner, such as wasting money, procrastination, or laziness, but because the unread books they purchase reveal more about who they are.
Unread or less-read books actually indicate that there is more they want or need to know and that there is so much more to discover in this endless universe. So, I did that too. Now the internet answered why I didn't read my books, both electronic and physical. I bought them because of an undiagnosed FOMO, maybe; if I don't do like others do, then I feel like I'm missing out lol.
So, now I subscribed to this managed hosting service for this app called BookStack. BookStack is a lightweight wiki software and a website that I pay rent for, which can be accessed at this site: bookstack.kadaikupi.space.
Personally, I very, very don't know what to post or publish here. Sometimes it comes to my mind that I want to post low-quality content (shitpost) lol, and sometimes I want it to be a site to post quality information instead of low-quality. Or maybe both.
This showed me that there is so much for me to discover that I haven't found anything, not even one thing, to post or publish on my wiki site.
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There are several reasons that I'd like to see a "self-unfurling car tent" that could extend from a car and cover it when parked, and "de-furl" itself when returning to a car.
Shield the car from sunshine
People are always trying to park in what (usually very limited, where I am) parking spaces that are shaded. Carry a reflective, vented tent, and the problem goes away; you've got your own shade everywhere you go.
There are already car covers:
But these don't self-unfurl and furl, so they're enough of a pain to use that most people won't use them unless they're parking their car for some time; manually deploying the thing on a grocery store trip isn't worth the effort. The most people will normally do is put up a windshield sun shade, which is a lot less effort to put up.
Solar panels become a lot more practical
Volvo had a prototype unfurling-from-the-trunk solar canopy over a decade ago; I haven't heard of it since.
That thing took up a ton of space, and wouldn't work in a parking lot, but something that closely-matches a given car model's exterior shape might be a lot more practical.
There are vehicles that have factory built-in solar panels now; the 2025 Toyota Prius PHEV has a solar roof option, for example:
But they don't provide a lot of surface area, because they can't cover the whole vehicle, just part of the roof, so provide a limited amount of power. That Prius can get a maximum of about four miles (6.4 km) a day of range from sun.
But you can put whatever you want on the exterior of a tent that's only deployed when parked; surface constraints go away, so now you have a lot more surface area to work with.
There are existing car covers that have integrated solar panels, but the solar panels on these are tiny, just designed to keep a car battery topped off when a car isn't being used for long periods of time; they aren't designed to feed a larger battery bank.
Hail resistance
There are some places in the US where hail is a real problem, where it damages a ton of vehicles every year.
Cars, which are normally rigid, don't do well with hail. Fabric-like materials, which are springy, do a great job. There are some existing car protection systems that fit onto a car that make use of this, have a little standoff distance to permit the hail to decelerate in, as well as fixed structures and manually-deployable static fabric hail protectors. Looking online, soft-top convertables will suffer damage to the body in hail that the soft-top roof can just ignore. I don't know how well hail resistance would play with flexible solar panels---might need to pick one or the other. But I'd expect at least one or the other to be possible.
Issues
There are some issues I can think of.
A big one is that car exterior surfaces are more durable than tents, and I can imagine accidental damage being more of an issue for the tent, like being cut or something. Maybe it'd be practical to make such a system out of modular pieces that zipper or otherwise easily attach to each other, and if one piece of the tent is damaged, just pick up a new one, detach the old one, and stick a new one in; no big deal.
Theft of the tent (or pieces thereof, if modular) might also be an issue.
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