Eli5: Amid of soaring gasoline and electricity prices, why aren’t we seeing solar powered cars making to the mainstream?
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Solar energy is great, but only because it scales well, which isn’t a luxury you get to utilize when it comes to engineering personal vehicles. A single solar panel doesn’t provide a ton of energy, but you can stick thousands of them in a desert somewhere or on top of roofs and boom you can get a decent amount of power output. Sadly we cant stick a thousand solar panels on a car so you are stuck trying to optimize the panels you can stick on or by cutting weight to the car in an effort to make them more efficient. This is why 100% solar cars, which do exist but largely as a college science project, are very small with basically no comfort options. No AC, upholsters seats, Radio, room for a second person, trunks, etc. Despite all this aggressive weight cutting they still have relatively low top speeds. Solar panels just dont have the energy density to be useful on a car.
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