Slashdot Mirror
Ford Will Demo Solar-Charged Car At CES
Lucas123 writes "Ford plans to demonstrate its first solar-powered hybrid vehicle at CES next week. The Ford CMAX Solar Energi Concept car will have 1.5 square meters of solar photovoltaic cells on its roof to generate power to charge its battery. By themselves, the PV solar panels generate only 300W of power — not enough to charge the vehicle's battery in one day. Ford, however, said the car will be coupled with a carport that has solar concentrating lens atop it. The magnifying lens, called a Fresnel lens, will concentrate about 10 times the solar energy so the vehicle can be recharged in a single day — the same speed with which a standard hybrid charges using a plug." (Of course, some charge faster than others.)
I wonder how many people are going to actually install the car-port? Who is going to fight the zoning issues, get building permits, put up with an ugly structure, and a car that moves by itself to stay in the Fresnel lens sweet spot? How many bikes, toys, and other associated back yard objects get run over?
I suppose the canopy could slide a cover over the lens when the car is absent.
But who wants to climb into an 800 degree car, and spend half the power gained running air conditioning units to cool it down?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There is a parallel universe of concept cars somewhere, where you can drive a microturbine powered Jaguar, solar charged Ford, Mitsubishi EVO with in-wheel motors and ATTESA-like control, there are probably a bunch of nuclear powered Ford Nucleons whizzing about as well, and everyone swaps batteries in project Better Places station like there is no tomorrow. The logo of Shell is largely replaced by Duracell in cityscapes.
Meanwhile in the real world, we can all buy a Tesla Model S for a low starting price of cool $70K or thereabouts and hope they install a fast charger somewhere close by. And of course, wait in line.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Why put them on the car? Put 10x the panels on the canopy and run a WIRE to the car to charge it. The panels could go to the grid if the car is not present. The weight savings will help the car, they will be cheaper panels for the wattage on the canopy and you can have a real amount of them. Panels on top of the car will often be wasted being covered by trees, parking garages and being at a less then optimum angle.
The obvious way around this is to have a heat exchanger under the solar panels
A more obvious way around it is to have the panels feed their power into the grid, so that they can be productive whether the car is in the carport or not. Then charge the car from the grid so it can still be charged at night, on cloudy days, or when parked somewhere else.