Quote:
Originally Posted by jesse.rizzo
It will probably just be a matter of time before PV tech evolves enough to power a car shaped car.
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Not even possible. You're up against basic limitations of nature, starting from the fact that sunlight has only about 1000 watts per square meter - and that's in orbit. Atmospheric attenuation is going to reduce that - maybe not too much in the middle of Australia, but a whole lot in Seattle or the Northeastern US.
Then consider that the effectiveness of solar cells is reduced by the cosine of the incident angle. If you have say 5 m^2 of cells on your car, they have to be perpendicular to the sunlight to generate full power, which is going to be pretty hard to accomplish unless you're a stunt driver.
Bottom line is that under the best conditions, you may have one or two horsepower to work with. That may be enough to move a car at decent speed on the flat, but is going to reduce it to a turtle-like crawl on the uphills. (Yet another reason those solar races always seem to be held in the Australian outback - not a lot of hills there :-))
No, if you've got solar cells, the best thing you can do with them is leave them home, on the roof, where they're making power whenever the sun shines.