this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Article says it was tested for 12 month and provided 60% of the energy needed for the commute each day.
Without doing the math, that means they've broken several barriers in solar panel development, and this paint is more efficient than regular solar panels. If true, these guys aren't a car company any more, they are a solar company.
And the absolutely last thing we should be painting with this stuff is a vehicle that will likely spend much of its time inside a garage. If this breakthrough technology truly exists we should be painting all kinds of other things with it instead including currently existing solar panels apparently.
Gotta start somewhere and it's probably really hard to pitch expensive paint as a solution. If cars with solar paint take off, the prices come down substantially....and if it goes on a fancy car, it's got the cool factor now
I'm borrowing this from elsewhere, but someone has done the math and says it works out.
The typical daily driven distance is only around 50 km or 30 miles, EV consumption is around 4 mpkWh so that's sound 7.5 kWh to recover in LA it's 9 hours average sunshine per day. So we need to collect solar energy at a rate of 830 W.
At 25% it's 3.4 kW solar radiation.
Solar intensity in LA is only around 300 W/m2
So you need 11 m2 coverage.