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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
Costs too much? We won't know until it's finally been released (or not) and if it sells (or not). A lot of people seem to like to have some overkill. Some people even like to have too much overkill.
The point was that if one day you get 1 mile of solar and two days you get about 60 it all averages out to around 40 miles per day. The bigger the battery the less a specific day's weather matters. So what does it matter if you get a few days of bad weather if your car has considerably more than 40 miles of range, assuming you don't need a battery that's always topped off every morning??
Race cars follow the same rules of physics as other cars, just on the overbuilt side of things. The point is that they move with solar energy from integrated solar panels. Sure, I don't expect to go 80mph all day long in an Aptera. But why is an average of 40 miles per day on an average place on Earth considered so "impractical" or even "impossible?"
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The achilles heel of EVs is the battery. It's comparatively awful to a fuel tank in nearly every measurable way, and among the worst attributes is the cost. Having a battery large enough to buffer unreliable charging means maximizing the investment into the only thing that sucks about EVs.
Where I live in the PNW, winter solar production is 1/5th that of peak spring production. That means I would need a battery 5x larger than I would need during springtime so I can get through the winter... maximizing the only thing that sucks about EVs.
In the battery constrained world in which we live, it's important to build the minimum capacity battery capable of reasonably accomplishing the tasks at hand. Oversizing for rainy days should be avoided.
The problem isn't that nobody wants to buy such a thing, it's that they are so few that would pay the premium required to make the business profitable. After all, there's a market for anything... I had a coworker buy a bag of racoon teeth online. For the racoon teeth business to work, then need more than 1 buyer... they need a continual stream of buyers. Same for a limited-utility solar powered EV. They are the racoon teeth of vehicles because few will pay for the novelty.
BTW, the large battery problem is exactly the same problem faced by the renewable electricity industry. You've got to build 3x more capacity than typically needed to get through seasonal differences and unpredictable weather. It's doable, but why when there are cheaper alternatives? A few people are willing to pay extra for a worse product, but most people aren't.