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‘World’s first off-road solar SUV’ just drove across Morocco powered only by the sun
(edition.cnn.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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If I calculated this right, assuming it drove continuously, they were only able to travel at around 2.5MPH with this thing?
Most likely the car was parked during the day and charging from the sun as it would take hours to charge even a small battery. They then drove at night/early evening/late afternoon over a couple of hours at around 30mph until the battery was empty and repeated.
If it was 10 days of driving with an average of 62 miles a day, that only needs to be a very small battery even compared to even a gen 1 Renault Zoe that has 22kwh. They could probably get away with 15kwh or so (approx. 4 miles per kwh), which would make charging it off car sized solar panels possible in a day.
Majority of Europeans only do very low daily mileage. The UK journey average is only 8 miles. So this car works for those sort of use cases, although there are always going to be outliers who need more, so good job there already cars that cover them.
Yes, if you park it outside in a sunny area. Which in a European city would be tricky because it would most likely be parked in a garage, or maybe street parking to get that sun but even then it would be under the shade of buildings most of the time.
Bottom line - if you want to charge your car with solar, you're better off charging at home with solar panels on your roof. And maybe a home battery to charge during the night with electricity generated during the day.
Well there is a reason this was done in sunny Morocco rather than rainy Britain.
However even in shade you'll still generate electricity, just not as much.
I see this is inline with this being more of a range extender the same as good regen for those that can't get full sun all the time. I get between a quarter and fifth back from regen, if I can get that again from solar then that's huge.
Personally I won't touch panels in the UK at present because the yield from the number of panels you can actually fit on an average UK roof is just pathetic over a full year. We need greater efficiency to make it work, which would also benefit cars like this.
The idea of a separate house battery is a good one however anything of decent size for whole home when you have cooker, heat pump for heating and water, the cost of inverters, plus EV charging being a few 10s of kwhs (we do between 300 and 400 kWh between three cars every month) is just a non starter in the UK for the average home. They would need too large a battery and need a huge amount of solar to charge it, we just don't have the room or return on investment.
It makes more sense to use the very large battery you already own on the car and do it that way. Charge at work using their solar and return it back home.
I imagine the car wasn't moving for the entirety of the 2 and half weeks. Drivers probably had to sleep.
Even accounting for 10 hours a day to rest, that still only comes out to an average speed of 4.4MPH over 10 days. This is obviously mostly charge time I'd imagine, but you still need to account for that time when you're embarking on a trip.
I'm curious how much of that really is charge time. They may have left it charging all through the daylight hours and then drove 60 miles every evening.