past_the_moon Fantastic job! what about fitting a big alloy roof rack with a bunch of solar panels? wouldnt that increase your distance? solar panels in the rear side windows too perhaps?
The extra weight and aerodynamic drag of the solar panels would probably cancel out any benefit...but, just doing a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, solar panels are say roughly 1 m x 2 m....the car is less than 5 m long and less than 2 m wide, so if you have 5 solar panels it would more than cover the car’s footprint (sort of like a carport!)...each panel would be say 300 Watts...so 5 panels would be ~1500 Watts, or 1.5 kW. So, that might be enough to run an AC compressor, but wouldn’t move the car along very fast LOL! However, if you parked up for a day and had good sun, with a 1.5 kW system, you might get 10 kW-hours of charge. Our car uses about 250 Watt-hours per km, so that 10 kW-hour charge would get you about 40 km. So yes, it could be done. No, it wouldn’t be enough energy to propel you along very fast, but yes, it would enable you to get “free” energy from the sun during the day. We really need to start an EV blog. :) Happy to answer any other questions you might have.
