141–150 of 418 posts
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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
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.
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…
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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.
Having worked on a solar car as a student project, solar panels on a car are at best a marketing gimmick. There's definitely not enough area on a car to power a car anyone wants to drive, even under ideal conditions at a reasonable duty cycle, and issues of shading are even worse for a car than a stationary panel. Also solar panels are fragile and encapsulating them so that they are robust enough to be on the exterio…
I think they improve the car not just from a convenience perspective (i rarely drive more than 100 miles a week in the city) but also it helps more of your energy usage come from the sun rather than non-renewable sources you might be indirectly pulling from the wall.
Initially they were founded in 2016. The founders built their prototype by-hand and themselves, which I find very inspiring.
In 2019 they had to do a crowdfunding campaign to raise 50M EUR for research costs so that they can go to mass market production. They had ~13000 signups in that campaign. Before that, most investors wanted a too revenue-focussed investment, and the company wanted to build an affordable mass-market car. They also embrace the vision of car sharing as a more sustainable infrastructure for cities.
The CES live presentation (probably why they are popular now) from earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhlHJ9FA7q0
Personally, I think this is the kind of vision a company like this needs. I mean, we probably can agree that it's first-gen and that it will have a few bugs and quirks, we all know that.
But if more companies research on solar and battery technologies, they hopefully will get more efficient so that a concept like this can solve more edge cases.
And remember, Tesla didn't build their first-gen cars either; they did it the same and reused parts from Continental, BMW and Lotus among others.
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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.
It's easy to dismiss this as green washing, but there is some value to it for city cars. The amount of electricity generated is never going to be enough to fully power the car, but that's not really the point. If having solar panels on your car roof means you can avoid charging much in summer, that will make owning an electric car for people who live in cities much simpler - and so support adoption. As a back of the…
This problem of "energy" in particular electricity, can be solved, but requires buy in from millions of different parties (HOAs, building owners, real estate developers). Unless the law changes where you can compel / force these stake-holders to adopt solar panels, change will never come at scale in urban areas. It's possible, it just requires so much buy in from so many individual entities.
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The panels wouldn't be that much heavier than a regular steel panel. The real weight is in the batteries. It's not a fake if its still in development, which it clearly is
I agree solar panels' weight shouldn't be a big problem. About the fake, their car has suspiciously the same proportions than the BMW i3 and they have been accused of using many parts of an i3 in the past. But I want to believe they are trying for real. The i3 has a carbon fiber roof by the way.