Check out @WolfpackSolar's work to design a solar car -- it's awesome! https://t.co/5WtE3B7Qf0 #wolfpack #gopack #thinkanddo
toddl said:
Not to be too much of a stick in the mud, but I have a lot of questions about their actual goal. A commercially-viable car? Okay, then it has to be able to run while it's cloudy or at night. Therefore it has to have batteries. If you're making a car with batteries, why not just put some solar panels on the top of a Tesla. And do the energy calculations to see how long it would take 2 square meters of solar panels to recharge those batteries (hint: forever).
A commercial electric vehicle uses ~15 kWh to drive 50 miles. To generate that much electricity in a day using solar panels, you'd need a 4kW system, about 16 normal panels. A normal panel is about 1.5 square meters and generates about 250W. You can fit maybe 3 square meters of solar panels on a car, which can provide up to 500 W of electricity.
End result is that a solar farm the size of your house could generate enough electricity to power your car for 50 miles a day. Or a solar farm the size of your car could generate enough electricity to power your car for 5 or 6 miles a day. There's not much you can do in the way of fancy engineering that can overcome physics. Either figure out how to make solar panels 10x more efficient or figure out how to make your car 10x lighter. Those are really the only options.
So....why not try and accomplish one of these things? Particularly the panel efficiency part?toddl said:
physics. Either figure out how to make solar panels 10x more efficient or figure out how to make your car 10x lighter. Those are really the only options.
Pacfanweb said:So....why not try and accomplish one of these things? Particularly the panel efficiency part?toddl said:
physics. Either figure out how to make solar panels 10x more efficient or figure out how to make your car 10x lighter. Those are really the only options.
If we never work on it, we'll never do it.