Supose you already have the drag for both. Drag, weight, power of electric motors, all for both.
A solar panel do not need to have the same power output as the power of the electric motor. With batteries you can store some energy everytime you park on sun or reduce speed a lot. On road in cruiser mode you only use a fraction of the power of electric motor, if have good aerdynamics and the road have no climb.
Solarworld No1, Morelli based, similar to Aptera, have a 1800W solar array, using 29% efficient solar cells.
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Originally Posted by redpoint5
You would need to use a computer model to calculate the projected power increase vs the projected aerodynamic penalty, or create a scale model and test. Many variables involved.
My sense is that solar is useless on a vehicle. Under ideal conditions (pointed directly at sun and no clouds), there is 1kW of sun energy available for every 1m^2. You might get 25% of that in electricity, so 250 watts. That's roughly 1/3 of a horsepower (746 watts) for every square meter of direct sunlight.
The added weight, cost, and aerodynamic penalty for using solar cannot be offset by the meager output.
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