The road-legal car has a top speed of 145 kilometers (90 miles) per hour. On a sunny day, its battery range is around 710 kilometers (441 miles) on roads, and around 550 kilometers (342 miles) off-road, depending on the surface. In cloudy conditions, the team estimates the range could be 50 kilometers less.
This actually seems pretty good. I suppose those numbers would go down over time and depending on how dirty they are.
Those filthy numbers will go down all day
Wait what are we talking about?
That’s by draining the battery, not by sustaining a charge. If it gets 710km in the sun and 660km in cloudy weather, it probably gets 610 without any solar panels at all.
Ugly as sin but I’m down if I can drive it mostly solar and plug in when needed in a more temperate climate
Edit: I feel like a lot of you are forgetting it just needs to get you to work, where it sits in the sun for 8-12 hours, then home where it can be plugged into homes or left outside for non-homeowners. If it can build enough charge during that work parking lot for me to get home and then top up on the home charger, that’s a huge plus over just plugging in and eating grid energy all the time. I’m not expecting the thing to have no battery and just convert sunlight to movement like magic jfc….
You wouldn’t, there is actually very little energy in solar for an array the size of a vehicle roof, and it would likely take days to recharge.
I can’t YET, this is clearly early technology, in a few years who knows. Remember we went from not being able to fly to landing on the moon in a lifetime
nope. not “yet”. just not physically possible. even with 100% efficient panels.
There just is not enough energy in the sunlight hitting the car. You would have to somehow make the sun shine brighter. Which is not really possible.
Wait wait, how are you calculating that? If you take a generic sea level solar irradiance of 6kWh/day/m2 and let’s assume the car has a solar panel area of 3m2 (probably more, but maybe not all exposed at the same time) with a solar panel efficiency up to 30% and the cosine for solar angle (say ~0.7), given the best 0.137 kWh/km around, that gives around 30km a day. That’s already enough for my weekday return commute.
All this neglects shade, cloudy days, won’t work for all latitudes…but it can also be upgraded with improved battery storage/weight, improved solar panel efficiency and maybe even the area of the car top and shape of panels can be improved (e.g. make them extendable/orientable when parked). At worst, you just top it up to 500km from the grid every weekend and that will make up for the difference over the course of the week.
Fuck, don’t give them ideas, climate change is bad enough as it is…
The problem is, there just isn’t that much energy in sunlight, so even a perfect solar panel that captured 100% of the sun’s energy wouldn’t get you very far.
I’m not very well versed in solar tech, but what I think I know is that we’ve already approached about the max efficiency out of solar already, so there probably won’t be large gains going forward.
silicon solar panels are at their limit which is something like 30% efficient. Newer chemistry will go beyond that but as the other comment said even with double the power there isn’t enough energy in sunlight for a car sized panel to get a car going for too long. Especially when there are clouds out (most of the time here)
Well, I wouldn’t expect a bunch of engineering students to be on the cutting edge of style anyway, so I’ll cut them some slack in that department.
Www.Aptera.us has 700 watts of solar and consumes ~100wh/mile.
Powered only by the sun and pure ugliness
The car is a prototype built by a team of students to maximize sun-exposed surface area and minimize air drag, wtf does it matter if it’s ugly to you? Fucking car fetishists.
look at me I don’t know what humor is
look at the people unwittingly perpetuating marketing stereotypes (like form before function) under the guise of “humor”
relax
Calm down.
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That thing looks like it’s the mullet of cars lmao.
Welcome to how prototypes work.
Thanks, I hate it
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There is no actual information on how self sufficient the car actually is. There is only 1 number which states how long the car drives on a sunny day with solar+battery combined.
The car probably needs to charge for days via the solar panels in order to fill up the battery.
Yeah, nothing on how much is pre-loaded battery and how much is solar charging, or how long the trip was.
there doesn’t need to be. It’s not. plain and simple. There just isn’t enough area on a car’s body (remember, most of them won’t even be oriented properly most of the time) for panels to generate enough power for self sufficiency. Even if the panels were 100% efficient. This will always be the case for any solar car.
I mean that’s just not true unless you’re referring to the very narrow scope of powering itself while driving down the highway at 70MPH.
With a sufficiently efficient design and enough solar panels and sun exposure, like can be seen on the Aptera, you can get 30-40 miles of range/day, which is more than sufficient for a daily commute.
How on earth can they get that much solar area power on a car? Many others have tried and it has always said there is just not enough space on a car to generate the amount of solar you need less ultra light, impractical cars. Feels like BS especially since there are no details.
That car looks very funny
Is this your first time encountering prototypes?
You mean ugly as sin
How come there are so many here heckling prototypes for being ugly when the ford T was bought 15 million times?
And yet people flocked to buy pt cruisers and that was a finished model.
Misread headline as “world’s worst off-road solar suv” and thought, “it’s nice there’s enough competition in this space for there to be a worst one.”
My gosh that’s hideous.
Literally looks like The Homer — the Car Built for Homer.
Still better than the Tesla truck, dough.
uses “lightweight and robust” composite materials to cut weight
Pretty great as an experiment. I wonder how this would fare in crash tests, whether there’s a way to make composites work in practical scenarios.
Usually that’s marketing speak for carbon fibre. And that is certainly safe, the bodyshell of the the BMW i3 is basically made entirely out of it. Or was, it was released back in 2013 and discontinued last year.
Ok now do british columbia
Of course its the Dutch.
This is a neat project…and terrible reporting.
Did they start out with any charge? How long to charge it fully via solar? How long it took them to do their trip? You could easily read this and think they did it by driving the full range (one of the few stats they give) out every day unless you’re knowledgeable enough to see what they’re not telling you. Is that range at 30mph? People are reading range figures and thinking, “well, gee, the EVs I can buy only do X and this does Y!”, which isn’t comparable at all without how that range is defined. If those figures shouldn’t be compared to regular cars, then say it in the article! This is a 20-30 mile a day charged-by-solar-in-the-desert-near-the-equator vehicle, which isn’t nothing, but not really as presented. Greenwashing (it’s probably not) or whatever this should be called doesn’t help the needed planetary shift away from fossil fuels.
Looking for other reporting (where are other commenters finding the duration of the trip?):
Guardian - no mention of time.
bonus: “We hope this can be an inspiration to car manufacturers such as Land Rover and BMW to make it a more sustainable industry. The car was actually very comfortable in the off-road conditions as it is very light and does not get stuck.”
Remind me how it was so lightweight again? Does it have LR & BMW level noise damping? It surely had AC and all that right? I don’t know because that info wasn’t provided. You don’t need to convince LR and BMW, you need to convince consumers to go without those.
Daily Mail - no mention of time
Designboom - no mention of time
Jalopnik - no mention of time, which is disappointing for a car specific site
This is a cool project and it’s cool university students did it, but why leave out such a misleading pieces of information? It’s bandied about as a “showing people it’s possible” thing as in, “you could have a solar car!”, but leave out all the bits that really make it possible, like forgoing AC or the daily miles driven. That none of the reporting on this has this information either means [puts on tinfoil hat] it’s a vast conspiracy to make green stuff look more palatable [tinfoil off], it’s all confluence of interest in making it look more palatable, or the information just wasn’t given out, or they’re all referencing the same source news-wire style. Frustrating.
Where’s the real information? I feel like we’re in a race against time to move away from fossil fuels so things like this need to not be misleading.
Edit - I’m stupid, it does say week and a half long…which only proves the point I think in not contextualizing range and such, because that’s a long time
But why do they keep making those eco concept cars look so goofy? Wouldn’t it be better marketing if it looked cool instead? I don’t get it…
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it’s not meant to be marketed for sales. It’s not for sale.
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aerodynamics.
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- It’s designed for a very specific purpose for solar. Not for aesthetics.
- It only looks goofy because you’re not normalized to it. Current car design would look goofy 50 years ago.
