It seems like even a small solar panel on the roof of an electric car would make a lot of sense. When you’re sitting at work for 8 hours, your car can just soak up some sun. I’m assuming there is some sort of problem related to cost, rather than efficiency, but I can’t figure it out.
Edit: Thanks for the help. It makes a lot of sense now. I appreciate the in-depth answers too.
In: Engineering
Solar panels are heavy and do not generate very much power per area.
A typical car has perhaps 4 m^2 of area on top of it. In the very sunniest areas, that’s about 20 kWh of energy collected per day on average. A Tesla gets around 3 miles per kWh, so that adds about 60 miles of driving – about a 25% increase in range – at most. But the solar panels are heavy (so they drag down the efficiency), they would require you to park in the sun (which you often won’t be, especially in cities where EVs are most common), most areas get less than that 20 kWh (that number is Arizona-desert-level sunlight), and they’re expensive.
Finally, if you wanted to add weight that badly, you’d just add a bigger battery and get more extension of your driving distance.
All in all, it’s easier to just plug in.
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