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Comment by jakedata | Hacker News Reader

This or something similar would be my ideal RV. Cover the top with solar panels and you could park indefinitely. To top up for trips, many RV facilities have 220v power for charging and I could afford to wait. For boondocking, do it "Martian" style and have a stack of folded panels ready to deploy.

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Isuzu also has an electric chassis truck: https://www.isuzucv.com/en/nseries/nseries_ev

A west coast company already takes Isuzu 4x4 trucks and turns them into pretty amazing campers: https://earthcruiser.com/

The have a whole new line for electric pickups, starting with the Hummer EV: https://earthcruiser.com/reserve-your-gmc-hummer-ev-earthcru...

Hummer is arguably a much better name for an EV than an internal combustion vehicle.

Super affordable! /s

It kinda sucks that any kind of decent camper van is so crushingly expensive for all but the upper middle class and rich.

How much do you think they ought to cost on top of the vehicle cost?

Starting at 600k for an off-road campervan. Who on earth buys these things?

Almost anyone who bought a home more than 10 years ago in a major metro area could afford it if they sold. I could comfortably spend 600K on some sort of boondoggle-mobile but I'd have to live in it full-time. A cellular or Starlink connection and a remote job could keep me going indefinitely.

Very rough calculation: assuming the RV is 5x2 meters that would be 10m^2 of solar panels. Solar energy that reaches the ground is about 1kW/m^2 at the peak, let's say that in a whole day we get the equivalent of 6h of peak energy (I'm probably overly generous here and not accounting for seasons and weather), and that the solar panels are 20% efficient. That makes 1x6x.2=1.2kWh per day.

The 4-battery version of the truck has a range of 400km with 448kWh of capacity, so that's 1.12kWh/km.

Putting everything together, running the truck on solar panels would afford a little more than 1km of range per sunny summer day of charge. To put it another way, a whole year of sun wouldn't be enough to charge the battery fully. So yeah, as tempting as it sounds, going full solar to power an RV that size is not viable. Even smaller ones aren't really either.

You forgot to multiply it by the 10 m2. And btw maximum size of the truck is almost 10m long so you could probably squeeze in closer to 20m2. So, you would get 20km range from a day of charging. Not earth shattering but better than nothing

I think he means powering devices while parked

Why?

It's an electric truck. When it's parked, it's also plugged in to recharge.

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