Slapping on a solar panel on the roof of an EV doesn’t give it …

Physics is beautiful. If you spend enough time studying sciences even at high school level it’ll give you a lifelong understanding of the rules the universe is governed by. Unfortunately, not everybody studied physics or had a great teacher like I did. That’s why I’m sitting on my couch on a rainy Monday morning having to give you all a lesson in basic physics when I could be writing about an interesting car.

At nearly 100 million miles away the sun giveth, the sun taketh. Almost everything on Earth is powered directly by the sun. Nearly all energy forms found here are either a direct result of the sun’s energy or a consequence of the sun beating down on us over millions of years. Even your gas-guzzling truck is powered by a metamorphosis of the vegetative life the sun helped create.

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The energy of the sun is immense. It’s impossible to put it into a perspective that an average person understands when you consider the energy it produces at any given moment. But here’s a figure we all need to understand. If we take the amount of solar energy we receive on an area the size of your car’s roof, it’s around 300-700 watts per day. Once you capture this energy using a state-of-the-art solar panel and store it in a lithium-ion battery you have enough power to run an average home ac for about 15 minutes!

The first solar panel fitted to production cars was in the W211 generation Mercedes E class. It was two panels fitted to the front and back of the panoramic roof which was also on its first outing. The function of these panels was to cool the car when it was parked in the hot sun, and that points to just how minuscule the amount of the solar energy captured is. Mercedes dropped this option in half a model cycle and it hasn’t appeared since. Fisker Karma 8 years later had a much larger solar panel on its roof but claimed to perform the same function. Nissan Leaf debuted a tiny solar panel on its sunroof around the same time and that performed the more serious task of providing an inkling of juice to the 12 V system in the car. But none of these units ever provided any motive force to the car it’s attached to, simply because it’s not worth the effort

Solar panels have a long way to go in terms of energy capture. Even if they reach 100% in efficiency and if we cover all usable surfaces of the car with solar panels we can move an average electric car at most a distance of three miles.

So unless you live somewhere close to the equator with no cloud cover throughout the year, and everywhere you need to go is a short walking distance from home, you cannot use a car powered exclusively by a solar panel on its roof.

It needs to be emphasized that it is possible to have wheeled mobility with the use of a fixed solar panel. But so many car-like features and creature comforts need to be sacrificed that it’ll resemble more a 4-wheeled cycle than a car. Solar panels at the peak of its development will produce a fraction of a supplementary boost for an EV at best. Unless the sun starts producing enough energy one day to power cars solely on its rays.

As a man of physics, I must concur, that that day too will come, albeit in about 4 billion years when the sun starts dying. But the caveat is you’ll get toasted alive if you step out of your protective housing. So, not exactly the best time for some solar-powered motoring.

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