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Mercedes-Benz says its testing solar power generating vehicle-paint that could coat vehicles, and generate 100% of their power requirements in sunny cities like Los Angeles. (evcentral.com.au)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Without doing the math, that means they’ve broken several barriers in solar panel development,

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.