No. Reflected sunbeams are not strong enough to charge solar cells. Solar cells work best, of course, under direct sunlight. They operate at far less efficiency on cloudy days, dpending on the amount of sunlight. When you spec out your particuliar system, your climate, surrounding trees and such, are key. For example, I did not need a large system because of my location where a home in say Seattle or Portland would need a larger system to generate adequate power.
I'll gladly give up the glass roof. It doesn't open on a Tesla anyway, nor does it have a built in shade. I'd rather have a solar panel anyway. Yep, make it an option. I get why they wouldn't want to add it considering how slow the charge is, but I would still want one. That 2-3 days sitting outside at a remote location covers my situation perfectly. My LaCrosse trips would mean I could fully round trip it with the 2 day stop while not having hotel charger access without stopping to charge in most cases.
You may be right, but I would suggest that money would be better spent on home solar panels because you can charge your car and home cheaper, especially in the longer run.
I get it and the only reason I like the idea so much is that I spend so much time parked outside away from home. It definitely takes a specific use case to get the benefit.
Yup, and the battery capacity is measured in kWh...thousands of Watt hours. Add in the fact that the car will have a less than ideal angle, so charge performance won't be as good as a stationary panel of the same size. The real estate just isn't there for this to be practical.
which is 900Wh; 0.9kWh, 6.3kWh for the week. This leaves him with 31.38kWh. The solar panels do not cover even the loss of the systems running on the car.Tesla said:
Then you'll want to bring a genset in this example.
Yeah, and it's not just the self discharge of the lithium batteries, which is about 5% a month, it's that, combined with the BMS (which not only monitors cell balance and state, but also keeps the 12V battery topped-up) and other embedded systems that ultimately create a pretty significant parasitic draw on top of the self-discharge (despite Tesla calling it "very slow").
I admire people who own their own errors and even laugh at them. It's known as integrity.
I just have to believe that if EV solar roofs worked that wack Elon would have them on his cars.
When flexible solar panels are cheaper than dirt you will see them on more cars, if nothing else to make the 12v battery last longer, and run an exhaust fan in the summer, which is a big problem on many modern “advanced technology “ cars.
I wonder how much life I actually get out of these portable batteries. I love the convenience and I actually bought an electric weed trimmer and chainsaw because they used the same batteries as my drill. It works much better I think than I originally thought because I rotate through the batteries as I use them for different purposes. The chainsaw doubles up the batteries for power and actually works well and I didn't think it would. I've cut down a number of medium sized trees and done a lot of brush cleanup.
