this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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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.
Look at you owning a rooftop to put solar on.
A lot of americans are renters and that number is unfortunately growing.
The apartment I was last in was several stories tall and, as such, the parking lot was shaded most of the day. Most of the parking spaces were even in a parking garage, so they get no sunlight. If you're in an apartment, odds are this won't work for you either.
There are companies working on non-permanent balcony solar though, which isn't as good as rooftop but still something. That'll still only work for probably about half of apartments (facing east or west), but it's inexpensive.
We do need solutions for apartment dwellers, but a solar car probably isn't it. We need to require a certain amount of availability of electric charging at apartments, and we also need better public transportation options and bike Infrastructure. This is a gimmick solution, not a real solution.
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.
That'll be super interesting if it ends up staying that way.
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.
Everything takes r and d. Also, it's not "custom solar panels" anymore if you're ordering 10,000 of them. The article stated that supposedly they have a ton of pre orders of sorts. Custom means a one off, or even a few dozen of something. Not thousands.
Everything requires R&D, but doing more things requires more R&D. It's not just an EV, which requires it's own R&D.
Custom means it has one purpose, not that it's a one-off. No one else will be using the same panels they will be, so they don't benefit from the scale of mass-produced panels (and 10,000 is not a large number even if that's the number they have pre-ordered).