Comment on Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs?
COASTER1921@lemmy.ml 6 months agoThe problem is that this isn’t really even trickle charging. Customers would absolutely complain and say it’s not working because it couldn’t charge the battery more than 1-2% in an entire day of sun. EV batteries are 60kWh+ yet getting more than 2kWh/sq meter daily from residential panels is hard for much of the US. Add to that the:
- weight of panels
- cost of panels
- heat trapped in the car from having a roof literally designed to absorb solar radiation
- fragility of panels (although all these glass roof EVs have that problem already) And it’s really not worthwhile.
One solution to the apartment street parking problem is adding charging ports to streetlights (they do this in Europe). But for most of US apartments there’s already dedicated parking space so also space for chargers. The unruly size of new vehicles is a much bigger problem in my mind, if there were actual motivation to fix this problem in government it would already be solved through some tax credits.