Solar panels as (essentially) bodywork seems like it would be less than ideal in actual use. Fender bender? Car got dirty?
I don't know anything about car manufacturing, but that seems logical I guess. The car is ugly, but $25k for an EV with 190 mile range seems like a pretty sweet deal, even if the solar panels turn out to be a useless gimmick.
And if you're in an area prone to drought (like places that get plenty of sun), washing your car may not even be feasible.
Fender bender? I had a lady back into my challenger, plain unpainted black plastic was $3000. Sure I didn't pay... but in terms of solar panel. Cant be worse.
Dirty? An actual excuse to wash your car for legitimate benefit? In terms of power production if not, should be fairly minimal reduction with exception of bad conditions like winter.
The actual reason why its bad and elon musk talked about it. Jehu garcia has a good video. omg 8 year old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_7rJs8hLs
Basically the power you can harvest isn't much. Even with the large flat roof of the samba. flipside, bad because the flat nose of the samba.
But lets say it works for you. you drive 2km to work and park in a sunny parking lot all day. It's not just expensive solar panels. It's the charge controller, it's the battery bms, its all these things you need to upgrade. These aren't trivial upgrades. The cost to integrate into a controller system like a tesla would double or triple the cost. solid state AC controllers are really expensive to beginwith. So in order to integrate solar into a tesla with their high power. It doesnt make sense. Take the money and put it in more battery or just charge off the cheap grid.
Flipside. Aptera did something slightly different. They are tremendously lightweight and aerodynamic. It lets them have low power to high performance. So in effect they have an equivalency to tesla in terms of power, but solar is handled.
What OP did was different since its not aerodynamic nor lightweight. They are VERY low powered. Their 0-60 times requires a calendar, not a stop watch.
Worse yet, there's not much you can really change here. There's no major breakthrough in technology which really changes this. There's really just not that much power even if you had 100% efficient solar panels. The solar state controllers are practically unimprovable, maybe room temp super conductors will help?
Complete nonsense. If you're only getting 1-2kW peak then an MPPT and grid inverter is about $300. If you already had 95% of it, then integrating the MPPT with the rest would be $50 tops. You could make a ghetto version of this at early-adopter retail prices with 800W of Sunpower 2mm thick flexible panels, some silicone adhesive, a 500Wh battery as a buffer, a full sine wave inverter with a timer/voltage control plugged into your normal 240V charger and a standard low power MPPT. It would cost about $3-4k and half of the added cost would be from the redundant step-up step-down of voltage and needing a buffer to satisfy the charger. You'd have to run your charger cable from the inside and you'd lose more power from reduced aero from the junction boxes than you gained if you went on the highway (unless you were willing to cut into the roof to put them under), but it's enough to prove your cost argument is wrong.
The cells would be $500 max at volume. Integrating them to the body would be the only expensive part.
It's not really viable for something as wastefully big and powerful as a tesla, but for an econobox you could add 10-20km/day fairly easily. Once perovskites are a thing the cell integration costs go down too.
The argument was true when monocrystalline panels were expensive, fragile and exotic. Now they're not. The main reason not to do it is people would bitch about appearance, then get weird expectations and it would be bad PR. This isn't worth charging a big luxury car ~one fewer times a month.
But mostly-not having to charge a city runabout that does <20km/day is a pretty compelling argument. People that buy econoboxes have much less fragile egos so won't clutch pearls about being able to see a functional element as much, and are more likely to lack the ability to plug their car in at home so not having to go find a charger every week is a more compelling feature. I'm not sure if the Sion hits this demographic as it's quite big and heavy and may be trying to do too many things. I expect the aptera to fill this niche quite well if it doesn't get legislated out of existence.