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Comment by hemapani | Hacker News Reader

Sri lanka has lot of sun, so effect of angle may be less

That is true, but carrying people around requires a lot of power, nothing that panels put that way can offer. He probably can gain a few minutes of driving by recharging his batteries in several hours of sun on one side (unfortunately making all panels pointed to other directions useless) but I am 100% sure that thing cannot carry people around just with solar power, especially with panels mounted that way. There's not enough data to call it a fake, but surely there's enough data to tell it's not optimal.

As i wrote in another reply: had this kid been a western youtuber, those who are downvoting me would be in line to write my exact words.

To make it even more clear: correcting a technical error does not mean I'm bashing the kid who committed it, and correcting a kid of a certain country doesn't mean I'm bashing that country.

>carrying people around requires a lot of power, nothing that panels put that way can offer.

humans produce 100-200w (top cyclists can do 700-800w for 1 minute), that is 0.5-1 m2 of modern solar panels under Sri Lanka sun.

But human cyclist don't speed off like a tuk tuk with passengers in it.

I think the issue is that the vehicle has no more surface area for panels. It couldn't extend them out further as that would make the vehicle more likely to collide with others.

It looks like the roof and sides are covered. I'm building a four wheel drive solar powered farming robot. We use four 800w panels, but on level ground it draws 40 watts at walking speed. I've heard there can be issues if one solar panel is in the shade and others are in the sun, but maybe that can be fixed with proper wiring. Anyway a few panels around the vehicle if properly wired could provide a real boost to the vehicle, even if its not gonna power it up hills for long. The really cool thing about solar vehicles is that in the daytime they are always ready to go. At least that's how our farm robot works. (link in my profile)

Correction we use eight 100w panels, 800w total.

Please do your research before you criticize. If you have ever seen a tuk tuk, you would know that the top is a curved artificial leather covering stretched on a iron frame ( https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1ChvBPXXXXXbaXVXXq6xXFXXXo.jpg) . If you look at this tuk tuk, you can see the steel mounting frame for the solar panels instead of the usual artificial leather covering. So I am pretty sure that the did install the panels there as well. Also it seems quite simple to induce that being knowledgeable enough to operate a welding plant and hook up solar panels, he would know that the best place for the panels would be at the top. The only problem is that a tuk tuk has around 1.3mx1.7m space at the top. So obviously he needs another place to mount some more panels and the sides would be the next logical choice.

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