This isn't the kind of car I would usually expect to see sitting in a driveway in this little town...
"The first plug-in hybrid solar electric vehicle in Canada."
I knocked on the door and ended up talking to a student who's modding vehicles in his automotive engineering program at the
University of Ontario Institute of Technology .
The students there didn't actually mod this particular Prius -
it was donated, already modded, by an Ontario utility company involved in vehicle-to-grid technology research. The students are just studying it.
(The guy I talked to is however involved with the EcoCAR competition - his team is fielding a Saturn Vue converted to 100% EV (80 kWh pack). I happened to have the ForkenSwift with me, so we had a chuckle showing him that too.)
Anyway, the Prius is a 12 kWh Hymotion kit with 240 watts of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells in 3 panels attached to the roof.
The edge shape of the array could certainly use some massaging, that's for sure....
I haven't had much luck finding fuel economy performance details about this particular car, though it was also featured at GCC (
Green Car Congress: Hymotion Plug-In Conversion Will Also Use Solar Panels), and in a newsletter by the company that had it modified (
http://www.veridian.on.ca/pdf/LDC_To...etter_2007.pdf).
The car has also been to Madison WI for hybridfest.