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That's cool as fuck. I heard about solar powered vehicles years ago, but they weren't nearly as successful as this one.
This is very cool indeed. I saw some solar racers run through Denver, CO decades ago and they were all tiny, ultra light weight (like a few hundred pounds), very low to the ground (like < 3 ft / 1m tall), and totally impractical.
This is the type of research governments should be investing in. This is awesome.
AND it looks cool.
It's nice to see the TUe going beyond the solar races and actually make a useful product. If I remember correctly, they did the race in a 4 person solar vehicle once, rather than design a car optimized for racing.
Apparently Light Year is a spinoff from them.
how fast tho
It says in the article top speed is 90 MPH. For the off-road conditions it's designed for, speed isn't the primary goal.
I imagine doing 90mph on a dirt road would feel like the jump to hyperspace. It’s been pretty rare where I’ve had to drive faster than 90mph on the roads myself so this rate of travel would meet my needs even on road.
Top speed is 90 mph with it's battery. You're not hitting 90mph on solar power only.
None of the articles I've found mention the exact start and end date, but their twitter say they started on the 12th and finished on either the 15 or 16th since that's when all the articles started popping up. That's about 150-210 miles a day, and I assume it's battery was fully charged before they took off which is 440 miles of that range. That's including them using their solar canopy to help charge the battery, and not just a purely static roof powered car Plus it's a best case scenario since it was the sunny Moroccan desert and not a city or somewhere with less intense sun.
Solar roof cars (for actually propelling them forward) is mostly a gimmick currently unless we can get some major solar panel tech improvements. There's just not enough square footage for the panels. They do make sense to run the AC while you're not in the car without depleting the battery, but outside of that they're just silly.
If it went 621 miles, and 440 was on battery, that means it went 181 miles on solar. Even if that was 4 days, that's still 45 miles per day on solar. That is an amazing achievement. That's enough that most people probably would never need to charge except when taking long trips, and would not just be a gimmick at all.
if roof panels were a pretty cheap addon for electrics it would be a no-brainer but they are probably still too expensive to make a lot of sense. better to just make the rest of the car more efficient.
It has a standard 60 kW-hr battery, so similar to a mid-range EV.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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