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Electric car that charges itself

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Re: Electric car that charges itself

#131

Post by bayindirh »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #119
throwaw2934238 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I already wrote in another comment, I think car sharing absolutely does not work at all, because everyone wants the cars at the same time. It's really difficult to find a car when you want it, for example on a sunday afternoon when the weather is nice. And it's totally unreliable, sorry bad luck no swimming for you today, a whole beautiful day wasted in your apartment. It's almost impossible hard to find a scoot…

> Owning a car still gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility to do what you want, when you want it. Which is not covered by car sharing at all. I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic. It is both much m…

> I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic.

I live in a big city. Not owning a car for me would be frankly insane. How would I get to work? It'd take ~2 hours with public transport only.

It is both much more practical and safer to use a car rather than a bicylce (too dangerous) or bus (cannot reach where I go) and metro rail (Have to walk an hour for nearest station) for commuting; taxi, minicab, or uber for other urban journeys; and car rental for weekends away (all are too expensive in the long run).

I get that cases may vary. it's different in other cities. But the idea that car = burden, always, is very silly. I was unable to go where I want/need to go quickly until I got a car, and it was liberating.

There, fixed it for my case. :)

Of course, YMMV. :)

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#132

Post by jiofih »

thedrbrian wrote: post #121
jillesvangurp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of cars don't drive much more than this per week and just sit outside on the drive way or parking lot. They are only used for short trips to work or shops. Solar charging ensures you only rarely have to plug it in to top it up, which is convenient. It also means that if you leave it sitting outside for long periods of time, it will be topped up rather than slightly drained when you get back to it. That convenien…

If someone is only doing 60 miles a week what’s the point of them spending 30 to 40 grand on a new car? Also how long is it going to take to save the carbon used in construction of the new car versus keeping the old one?

My car fits this profile. Short trips to school and a few errands, most under 5km. Used car, 20k+.

I can imagine this seems absurdly low for suburban America.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#133

Post by rythie »

mavhc wrote: post #126
rythie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner would be the landlord, there is no benefit to them installing solar panels unless it increases the rental value to pay for them, it likely doesn't. Solar panels don't add value to a house and may decrease it. [1] Also there limits solar panel installations in conservation areas in UK and your roof can face the wrong way, so they are not efficient particularly. [1] https://www.which.co.uk/news/2017/07/do-sol…

No money for generating solar power? I get 20p/kwh

Rates for new installations are much lower. Complicated to work it out, but seem to be around 4p/kwh. Also, the landlord would not benefit from any feed in tariff as the tenant pays the electric bill and would receive any feed in tariff benefit.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#134

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

bayindirh wrote: post #131
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Owning a car still gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility to do what you want, when you want it. Which is not covered by car sharing at all. I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic. It is both much m…

> I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic. I live in a big city. Not owning a car for me would be frankly insane. How would I get to work? It'd take ~2 hours with public transport only. It is both much mor…

The public transport in your city sucks, sorry about that. Maybe fix that, not daft distractions like solar panels on cars.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#135

Post by mjhagen »

hexa00 wrote: post #108
zksmk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting many people live in apartments in dense urban areas, and basically the only place they CAN put solar panels IS on the top of their car. Of course, they could just buy/use electricity produced elsewhere in dedicated solar farms, but that doesn't make you self-reliant, and could in theory cost the end user more money, depending on maintenance and cost of the vehicle.

These places also tend to have underground parking :(

or not much need for cars at all

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#136

Post by IkmoIkmo »

marco_craveiro wrote: post #44
dreamcompiler wrote: post #7

This idea will never be practical but it also seems it won't die. 69 miles per week of charging. Assuming the car is sitting outdoors all week and the weather is not cloudy. A Tesla can charge more than this in an hour.

I think in Europe many people (including myself) do less than 69 miles per week. We rely a lot on public transport for commuting and use cars only for a few things during the week. I suspect the target market will be very large here.

Not sure where the 69 figure comes from. Top post has more info:

> As a back of the envelope calculation, if you covered the ~2.44 m2 roof of a VW ID3 with solar panels you'd probably see somewhere in the region of 244 kWh / year (based on typical UK solar panel generation per year - this would be more in a sunny place). At 4.3 miles/kWh that gives you just over 1000 miles / year of self charged driving.

The 4.3 is pretty optimistic, most cars are rated around 3 miles per kwh, but I digress. Optimistically it'd mean 1000 miles per year or 19 miles per week, or 2.7 miles per day.

I'd say firstly, this is already a niche category. The average car drives 30 miles a day, or more than 10x what this would charge under optimistic mileage.

Second, the extra weight would likely make this comparison even worse.

Third, not really cost-efficient, either, to install a complete solar system for every 2.5 metres. Much of the cost isn't in the panels but in the system around it.

Fourth, I doubt even the 69 mile a week category of people will still mostly have personal cars within 5-10 years. The flexible car rental market is taking off. In Amsterdam for example there's now about 100 thousand users of Sharenow alone, one of the multiple car rental providers, on a population of about 800 thousand people. Anyone who drives 69 miles a week or 10 miles a day, is typically better off renting. At a speed of 20 miles per hour you're looking at 30 minutes or 6 euros per day for your complete car usage costs, i.e. 180 a month. That's less than most cars (300-400 a month) cost in insurance, deprecation, taxes, fuel and parking in Europe. These companies are expanding sufficiently to allow most people in this low-usage group to do away with a personal car within 5 years I think. By the time these solarpanel cars could even start coming online, it's likely that most cars will have increased usage rates and that these solar panels won't even power a few percent of the mileage.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#137

Post by jiofih »

iso1631 wrote: post #65
mavhc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those cars shouldn't exist at all though, massive waste of resources, renting cars should be much much simpler and cheaper

Rent a car that's delivered to a house reliably available at 8am each morning and 3pm every afternoon, with car seats, when everyone else is after a car at at least one of those times, half a mile from the nearest neighbour, 2 miles from the village, and 7 miles from the nearest town?

Sounds like an urban planning problem.

I can find half a dozen car sharing vehicles in a 400m radius from my house.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#138

Post by baybal2 »

jiofih wrote: post #129
baybal2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, even if you make the half of car surface a solar panel, you would probably not even get a net benefit because of extra weight, and drag from suboptimal hull shape needed to place cells.

Did you look at the URL posted at all? The car is in final design stages, has enough cells to deliver 250km of range per week.

How many kilometres per week they take? 0.05 increase in drag coefficient can alone eat the energy equivalent of 50km in a week.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#139

Post by mavhc »

rythie wrote: post #133
mavhc wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No money for generating solar power? I get 20p/kwh

Rates for new installations are much lower. Complicated to work it out, but seem to be around 4p/kwh. Also, the landlord would not benefit from any feed in tariff as the tenant pays the electric bill and would receive any feed in tariff benefit.

Most of those houses existed when the rate was high

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#140

Post by bayindirh »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #134
bayindirh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a big city (London). Owning a car for me would be frankly insane. Where would I put it? If I was communing again, could not possibly take it in to work, there would be nowhere to put it at that end either, when I finally got through the traffic. I live in a big city. Not owning a car for me would be frankly insane. How would I get to work? It'd take ~2 hours with public transport only. It is both much mor…

The public transport in your city sucks, sorry about that. Maybe fix that, not daft distractions like solar panels on cars.

Eh, the comment thread we're talking under starts with a comment [0] by me, supporting public transport rather than thse cars with an implicit sentence stating that my city's public transport sucks.

That's a nice full circle. :)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26474545

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