First Off-Road Solar SUV Just Drove Across Morocco Powered Only by the Sun | Hacker News Reader

First Off-Road Solar SUV Just Drove Across Morocco Powered Only by the Sun

cnn.com

19 pointsrmason9 comments

Sweet! Sounds like an amazing project for university students and they managed to prove that this can become a reality. Hopefully this will be the kick in the butt that auto manufacturers need to take solar power into consideration and that it'll go much faster than fossil fuel to EV transition.

In the end, the physics of it, for a consumer vehicle, just doesn't work out. No matter how much you'd like it, you can't fight the physics. The best you could do, with a vehicle that has an entire roof of solar panels, is a vehicle that you'd need to leave outside and wait for a couple weeks for it to recharge. That's still useful to a lot of people, but it's not this revolutionary "solar powered vehicle drives hundreds of miles a day" story.

Conveniently, the article leaves out every piece of data that you'd need access to to be able to actually judge what they built. The article is just a typical corporate puff piece to advertise for a company that wants to sucker in investment money.

This car wasn’t built by a company, but by a university that built a family of (generally ugly, IMO) solar-powered cars. See https://solarteameindhoven.nl/stella-family (which doesn’t have much info, either)

Can you elaborate? It says the car is only 25% lighter than a typical SUV with an off-road range of 500km, so it doesn't sound like any crazy compromises here.

A 500km range sounds like the range of a fully charged electric battery, but not the range from a single day of charging off the solar cell.

As a concrete example: folks have tested the 2024 Toyota Prius Prime and find that a full day of charging generates just under 1 kWh of power over the whole day (not 1 kWh per hour, 1kWh total) which yields just under 3 miles of driving (given 40 mi range and a 13.6 kWh battery). And as a sedan it also weighs about 25% lighter than a "typical SUV". Suppose this student car has 3x the solar panels as the Toyota -- that would only give you 9 miles or 14.5 km of range.

Ah thanks, yes, it doesn't mention how much time they spent charging. Although it does say the panels are extendable when stationary.

I don't know if it's "street legal" to drive without windows but I want to see a car that covers the windows in solar panels and projects the road on a monitor inside using external cameras. Would also help with heat buildup in the cabin and skin cancer rates for long distance haulers.

I once saw something like this on hackaday. It works well on RVs because you can charge up to 50km in one day and then drive to the next spot to camp. It is completely impractical on conventional vehicles.

Seems to be missing the important metric of how long the trip took.

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