– Why do electric cars not have solar panels on rooftop so they could be charged while driving/parked

Question

– Why do electric cars not have solar panels on rooftop so they could be charged while driving/parked

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Solar panels really don’t put out a lot of electricity.

Let’s take the Tesla Model 3 for example. Solar panels the size of its roof+hood only put out about 150 watts.

The Model 3’s smallest available battery option is 54 kilowatt-hours.

The mathematics of that mean that it would take 360 hours of perfect sunlight to charge the battery from empty to full. Or from another perspective, if you had 10 hours of perfect sunlight, it wouldn’t quite give you even 3% charge.