This is possible but probably impractical.
The available footprint of a normal car is about 6m2. At the Canadian border, you’d get about 1150 kwh/ rated kw in a year.
We’re just looking at technical plausibility, so assume thin film solar sold for drone wings. It’s 30% efficient and weighs 170 g/m2. So peak power of about 1.8kw and 1 kg of added weight.
You then get about 2000 kwh across the year, or an average of 5.6 kwh or so a day.
A typical EV will use 150 wh/km. So that’s 37km per day. The average driver only goes a little further than that per day.
The issues would be now the car has to be in an unshaded spot, and might still need to be plugged in seasonally. But if high efficiency thin film solar comes down in cost, maybe?
Btw one poster is claiming gasoline pollutes less than an EV. Not even close – EVs aren’t a static technology. The emissions and energy to make a kwh of battery have gone down steeply in recent years, along with cost.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/the-lifecycle-emissions-of-electric-vehicles/
Like everyone is saying: our current solar panels are not efficient enough to really provide enough energy for our current EVs. However, if we had much smaller and lighter EVs, then we could get there. Like this:
https://www.aptera.us/
Claims it can go 40 miles per day just on solar and without any charging.
Electric cars use a lot of energy compared to how much you can get out of solar panels:
A solar panel can only put out about 20 Watts of power per square foot, and that’s only in direct sunlight.
The current Tesla Model 3 has a 62,000 Watt-hour battery.
Let’s assume you could fit 65 square feet of solar panels onto the hood, roof and trunk of a Tesla Model 3.
62000 Wh ÷ (20 W/sq.ft × 65 sq.ft) ≈ 48 h
So it would take 48 hours to fully charge the car’s battery.
That doesn’t sound ***too*** bad, right? Just two days? ***Nope.*** 48 hours ***of peak sunlight.*** Most of the US only gets about 4 hours of peak sunlight per day, so it would take more than a week. Probably more like 2 weeks when you account for bad weather.
I was on the R&D team for an electrical vehicle company. My task was to research and report on all the current, up & coming and future technologies for electric and alternative power vehicles. Long story short, there is really no such thing a ‘free power’. Most things ‘consume’ more power than the generate (the weight of the panels are heavy, causing more drag therefore not efficient). Regenerative breaking, so far, is the best way to create instant power, but not long term…the battery is the weak link.
Not too many people realize the enormous negative impact mining for the minerals in the batteries have on the environment. Entire eco systems (forests, mountains, animals..) are destroyed digging out the ‘rare earth minerals’. Then the chemical waste to refine the minerals dumped back into the environment is very very bad (polluting water and land). Most of these rare earth minerals are mined from 3rd world countries and China which have little regards for the environment. “Clean Energy” is really not as clean as people think.
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