– Why do electric cars not have solar panels on rooftop so they could be charged while driving/parked
In: Engineering
Solar works best when it’s correctly angled to the sun according to your latitude. Right off the bat, you’re losing significant generation capacity just by having it at a random angle to the sun by virtue of it following the body of your car. Next, even if it was perfectly oriented, the square footage that your average vehicle offers means that you wouldn’t be able to have enough solar to generate enough electricity to do much more than run the AC for a while, something that you’re probably going to want to do after leaving your car in the sun all day. Next, what happens if you park in a garage? Or under a tree for shade?
Most people are going to be far better off covering your house roof with solar and just plugging your car into it when you are home.
That’s not to say that there’s no point to solar on a vehicle. If the car is efficient enough, like the upcoming Aptera electric car (which takes efficiency to such an extreme that it can go 1000 miles on the same battery that a Tesla can only go 300 miles on). In this case, solar does make sense because due to that efficiency it can gain ~30 miles, or the average American commute, each day it sits in the sun. So, under the right conditions, that car could legitimately never need to be plugged in.
Another reason solar on a vehicle could make sense is if you’re leaving it for many days at a time not plugged in. All electric cars have some degree of phantom power drain as the car uses a tiny bit of power even when parked. That drain is usually less than a percent of your battery per day but over time it can add up. If you park at an airport or head out to the bush to camp for a month or more your car could be down 10 to 20 percent by the time you come back. (Winter is a different story). So solar in this case could probably cover that phantom drain.
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