For anyone wondering about driving an EV long term on solar, this couple [1] is currently driving the length of West Africa in an EV powered by solar panels they carry with them.
A full day in the sun nets them about 250km of range (about 150mi). They just did a stretch of about 4500km (2800mi) powered exclusively by the sun, but they do sometime plugin to the local grid when possible.
Interestingly, I took 999 days to drive 54,000 miles right around the coastline of Africa in a gas powered Jeep, which means I averaged 54 miles a day. In their vehicle they can average around 75 miles a day, so they'll be able to do the trip faster than I did if they want to. It's worth pointing out though I would rather do it slower and have more experiences than do it faster.
250km is at least 40kWh. To get that in 15h maximum sun you need at least 2.7kW of panels. Naturally you don't have 15h of peak output, so 4.5kW of panels sounds about right.
The thing about a system like a solar panel, or any additional system on a vehicle is how to control the cutover. Solar panel cracked and I can’t charge from it? I hope the vehicle throws a “I’m not charging from the solar panel” code and I can move on, and it doesn’t go into a degraded drive state because of a non-critical system like this.
I've always been impressed at the cost effectiveness of the car industry. Namely cars are a miracle of competition. No other industry has been able to sell such large and complex products for so little. Yes 30k is a lot of money but it is nothing if you consider the costs of buying a car worth of parts individually.
Which to me indicates if car manufacturers ever decide to make on roof panels a standard feature it would be a net positive value add.
The panels do produce a measurable value. Well worth the 500 dollar cost which would be possible if makers included them as standard.
The challenge is getting to that local optimal requires going through the period where roof panels are premium options. Thus I suspect we will never reach that local optima.
Instead solar panels on cars will remain the esoteric interest of hobbiests and concept cars.
I’m still holding out hope that vehicles like the Aptera (https://aptera.us) manage to make it to production and help buck this trend.
From a sheer efficiency POV, rooftop or grid-scale solar installations will always be more effective than solar on an EV, but I think you’re right: there’s something to be said for how effective automakers are at packaging technology and pushing the frontier of competition that could further reverberate throughout the industry.
For the average consumer, purchasing your next vehicle and having all of these capabilities integrated is so much more straightforward and accessible compared to retrofitting your home with solar, battery, and the electronics required for managing the system and dynamically interfacing with the grid. If you’re a renter, many of these conversions are simply out of the question.
We are seeing more solar add-on options on conventional vehicles, with the likes of Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Toyota Prius Prime including solar roof options. But they remain premium options rather than standard trims for now, as you mentioned.
The point of solar on a camper van is to charge an auxiliary battery used for appliances. The range gains for the main battery pack are so minimal it wouldn't make sense unless the car spent the majority of it's time parked in the sun between locations.
> it wouldn't make sense unless the car spent the majority of it's time parked in the sun between locations.
That's exactly what people do with these things. You drive them for a few hours. Then you park it and you go off enjoying nature, or whatever it is what people do while camping for the next few days. Most cars in fact don't drive the vast majority of the time. They just sit there parked for well over 90% of the time.
It's not going to make a massive difference to range of course. But even keeping the battery at the same level or slowing down energy depletion while you are camping helps. And best case, you actually leave the camp site with a bit more range than when you arrived there. That's useful.
Which I believe is true for most consumer vehicles. They spend most of their time parked somewhere and little time actually being driven. The same is true of people, they spend 95% of their time sitting and very little time actually being active. However, in both cases peoples perceptions are warped by their exposure to the activity, they only pay attention to their interaction with a vehicle or moving when they do it, so it seems to them to form a major part of their life when actually it is quite small. A well known psychological bias. It is a big surprise for many people when they buy an activity tracker and find out they don't actually do much most of the time. I used to drive two hours a weekday to and from work, about 20,000 miles a year. Using a car continuously all year at 60mph would be 60mph x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day = 525,600 miles/year. So 20,000 miles per year means using a car 3.8% of the time. The other 96.2% of the time it could be charging via solar (and it can charge while driving also). Still, the amount of power from 600W of solar panels on a van is not huge, 4.8kWH per day for 8 hours of intense sunlight per day. Could take a week or three to charge an EV fully. People can choose where to park, so it seems like enough to be useful in many situations. Having solar panels on an EV could mean it would never be truly stranded, though having to wait a day or more to get to a charger might be bothersome. In a rainy/cloudy season solar panels would have much less value. If it was a $500 option on a mass produced EV it seems worthwhile. At $1000 I'd think twice but might still buy it.
> The panel can charge the ID Buzz while parked or driving and is capable of generating enough power to provide an additional estimated 1,864 miles of range over the course of a year. Averaged out, that's just over 150 miles of range a month, which isn't massive, but hey it's something, right?
Average miles driven per year is 13,500 or around 260 miles per week. The better way to look at it is 1864 / 13500 which maximally gives you about 13% of those yearly miles "for free."
With WFH, I wonder how those averages have changed. Some folks are using cars much less often.
However, as someone who has prior experiences with keeping a low mileage car, I'd say parking it out in the sun is a terrible goal. You really want it garaged to slow purely time-based deterioration if you are not hitting high miles per year. A power hookup in the garage is the way to go, and then get house solar if desired.
So then, this car-mounted solar is only useful during an extended outing where you are away from your usual parking. Can it ever become cost effective for the value it provides in such short bursts?
Those numbers seem widely optimistic and probably assume the panels are always optimally generating, when panel placement is a huge performance factor.
Those panels are maybe generating 0.1 kwh in the top quartile of exposure, and have a battery over 50 Kwh in capacity.
On an amazing day you may charge a single kwh. That's a 2% increase at best.
Every single naive person asks why they can't put a solar panel on a car and get rid of gasoline. They don't understand the surface to output relationship of solar power. This is mainly a marketing gimmick. Ideally those panels could be optimally placed and generate their full potential. Using them so inefficiently is a waste.
A full day in the sun nets them about 250km of range (about 150mi). They just did a stretch of about 4500km (2800mi) powered exclusively by the sun, but they do sometime plugin to the local grid when possible.
Interestingly, I took 999 days to drive 54,000 miles right around the coastline of Africa in a gas powered Jeep, which means I averaged 54 miles a day. In their vehicle they can average around 75 miles a day, so they'll be able to do the trip faster than I did if they want to. It's worth pointing out though I would rather do it slower and have more experiences than do it faster.
[1] instagram.com/4x4electric/
youtube.com/@4x4electric