Quote:
Originally Posted by oldtamiyaphile
This is in the corral for a reason:
https://www.engineering.com/Electron...r-Powered.aspx
Only mistake is that ~6hp is enough for a small car to cruise at a decent rate, but that assumes a five fold increase in efficiency over what's currently available.
I've got 5x4' of panels on my van. That's not enough to run a diesel engine, HVAC and radio. |
The Stella prototype that preceded this exists and actually works.
I have no doubts that this can be pulled off.
What is currently available are overweight rolling bricks with the most superficial levels of streamlining(cars today are moreso made to look aerodynamic than actually be such, although they are improved from what existed in say, the 1960s and 1970s, half a century ago, by about 50%) and enough "power"-everything features fully loaded into them to hog multiple horsepower that doesn't even go into moving the car down the road
The industry average Cd is around 0.28 and the typical vehicle is a "small" crossover that has a frontal area somewhere around 25 sq ft, and weighs around 4,000 lbs, while using tires with a Crr somewhere around 0.010, and comes "fully loaded" from the factory with all sorts of energy hogging features whether the buyer wants them or not in order to pad margins.
What happens when you gut all the luxury features(go back to roll-up windows, get rid of heated seats, go back to manual steering, and be rid of other profit-padding energy-hogging crap), cut the Cd down to 0.14 by actually focusing on the "substance" of how the vehicle functions in the air over its "style"(fake vents and oversized grilles are still a thing and we don't need them), cut frontal area down to 14 sq ft by actually making a small car(this is a similar frontal area to the old MGs and Triumphs of the 60s and most non-morbidly-obese people can still fit in them comfortably), cut weight to under 2,000 lbs(no exotic materials required and can be done by keeping everything simple with less-features), and use tires with a Crr around 0.005? You've now cut the power drain from features that don't even move the car from a constant drain of 3-5 horsepower down to almost zero, and your rolling drag and aerodynamic drag are now each roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of what they used to be.
A 3 or 4-fold increase in efficiency from reduced aero and rolling drag will get it very close, then consider getting rid of all the power drains, and now you've got your 5-fold increase in vehicle efficiency. You go from 30 horsepower needed to do 70 mph on flat ground down to 6 horsepower, pretty damned easily without giving up anything that is needed to get from Point A to Point B safely and quickly, and in the long run, will do it for much cheaper(this is the part industry hates because that means less money goes to them). Granted, solar power won't be meeting 100% of the car's needs to cruise 70 mph and the battery will drain, but if you have 4.5 sq m of solar panels of 20% efficiency in direct sunlight at 800W per m^2, you will get roughly 1 horsepower of usable solar energy to drive the car in direct sunlight, which would be enough power to allow the car to cruise at 30 mph on solar power alone without draining the battery, or if it gets 8 hours direct sunlight a day, enough energy to do more than 80 miles range at 70 mph on the highway without ever needing to be plugged in.
Of course, things get much more interesting when you design a car for 1 or 2 persons(perhaps a tandem 2-seater) instead of 4, and design the car to where the passenger being carried is at least half of the laden vehicle mass. Now you can make something the size of a velomobile that could maintain 60 mph on only 1 horsepower and accelerate like a musclecar with a modest 30 horsepower electric drive system... and probably run circles around said musclecar on a circuit track. And solar power would now be much more than adequate to make the vehicle move... 1 horsepower to do 60 mph and 4 horsepower to do 100 mph, when we now have Tesla making batteries that put out 280 Wh/kg, opens up a crap ton of possibilities, don't you think? A mere 3 kg of battery could get such a vehicle an entire hour of running on the highway at highway speeds! Should such a thing be produced in large volume, it is conceivable that a high-performance one-seater commuter electric vehicle, drive-able in all weather conditions, could be made for not much more than the cost of a motorized scooter. And you wouldn't need a lot of solar panels if you wanted to make it not require a plug most of the time...
Yet the industry is still stuck making oversized aerodynamic bricks of 3-box designs conceptually based on 19th century horse-drawn carriages...
As Luigi Colani has said about the trucking industry and the state/industry hacks controlling it, "The stupidity is overwhelming!"
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