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Electric car that charges itself

sonomotors.com

151–160 of 418 posts

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#151
post #113

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…

If they want cars at the same time each day, that's what mass transport covers. Problem is people don't pay the real cost of their car, it's subsidised by free pollution

No it doesn't, because the destination is not a densely populated place. People go in wheel and spoke formation in their cars out from the city into nature.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suspect you still haven't clicked on the link?

My dream HN feature is only allowing comments after the main link has been visited for 5 minutes.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#154
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And magic wireless transmission of electricity from said roofs to cars parked in the street.

Why? Wires up and down building are nothing new. Your objection does not seem reasonable.

Running out over the pavement to the cars in the street? With infrastructure to handle the problem of residents not necessarily being able to park in front of the buildings they live in.

It seems non trivial to me.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#155
post #149

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…

Or you could cover every residential building and parking lot's rooftop with solar panels and have charging stations for cars, and low cost electricity for the entire block, neighborhood, and city. 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…

why not both

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#156
post #82
post #78

It makes very little sense to be lugging solar panels around. It's just not worth it. Install them at home and charge. It might make sense if your vehicle is large and mostly stationary in remote locations where electricity is not available. Anyway, I think this product is fake and scam.

PV’s are light and can in theory get you ~12k/year range. Assuming the car is parked outside it seems like a win over home instillation of charging port, inverters, panels, etc. Obvious downsides include significant increases in repair costs in the event of an accident etc. But, panels have gotten cheap enough that this is at least worth considering. PS: I agree it’s unlikely to turn into an actual product, but it’s…

I drive a PHEV and I haven't really looked seriously and getting a charging port installed yet. Although it's slow, I can generally charge sufficiently off a regular 120V outlet to give me enough to avoid using gas for the day.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#157
post #110
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that you - own your house (30% rent in Europe [1]) - That you can charge at home (14% live in flats in UK for example [2]), many other properties don't have parking attached too and even for those with allocated parking, connecting a charger is prohibitively difficult (digging up roads / getting consent etc.) Governments will likely be slow to implement on street charging. There is a market for something…

Why hasn't the owner of the house put solar panels up? They own a house, by definition they're into long term investing

My HOA doesn't allow it or I'd have them already. And there is no way to fix this because the way the HOA is set up, it is impossible to get a quorum to change it.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#158
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could cover every residential building and parking lot's rooftop with solar panels and have charging stations for cars, and low cost electricity for the entire block, neighborhood, and city. 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…

why not both

Weight, complexity, cost, lack of freedom of paint color/wrap, and complexity/time/cost of repairs after minor collisions??

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#159

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…

Indeed, I were once skeptical (remembering EEVBlog's Solar Roadways series) but it really seems a good deal. Short commutes in cities can probably be covered. And a killer feature to me: if you ever get stranded somewhere without power, you at least have the option to wait a day or two to charge and get to somewhere nearby with power (around 3 miles/day for ioniq, 10 miles/day average for sion according to the articles).

Of course, smaller cars will probably have a better surface-energy consumption ratio, I don't expect to make much of a range difference for larger and utility vehicles. It's something I'd add to offroad vehicles just for the cool factor (of independence), even if the range added per day isn't significant in that case.

Re: Electric car that charges itself

#160
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can do both. It really just comes down to: are the solar panels worth the added manufacturing cost and weight? If it cost ten dollars and added one pound of weight almost everyone would want it. If it cost ten thousand dollars and added a hundred pounds of weight then few people would want it. The unknowns at this point are: what are people willing to pay and how much additional weight will they tolerate? And,…

> are the solar panels worth the added manufacturing cost and weight? "worth" here implies the third factor that you didn't explicitly mention: how much power you get off them. And "69 miles per week of charging" is pretty small, hardly worth it unless it's extremely cheap in vehicle cost and weight. You're not wrong with the qualifiers "people using their cars once or twice a week to drive 10km to do groceries" and…

> hardly worth it unless it's extremely cheap in vehicle cost and weight.

While the technology isn't there yet, it seems likely that this will eventually be the case.

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