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Popular mechanics
? Specifications: Base price: $27,750 Price (limited hybrid, with panels): $35,300 Miles consistent with gallon (limited hybrid): 47 Solar panel (this): 2 miles consistent with 6 hours of charging
Putting solar panels in a car is reasonable. And some brands have tried. The panels were an option at the 2015 Toyota Prius and popular at the Fisker Karma in 2012. The Tesla Cybertuck will have it as an option. But if weight and strength calculations showed that panels are a smart idea, everyone would. Right?
If you’re buying a new Hyundai Sonata, you can pay extra for the Hybrid Limited model, which comes with a solar panel roof. I tested one for a week in late spring, while working from home. Except for a ten-mile drive to the grocery store and back, the Sonata sat in the driveway, its 205-watt system earning free, clean miles.
Hyundai engineers estimate that a day with least six hours of good sun will gain roughly two miles of range. But those figures are for a car parked in Los Angeles, which gets more sun than I was seeing in the northeast in April. During my week with the Sonata, if the panels were working, I couldn’t really tell. The range calculator in the dashboard (which read an impressive 552 miles with a nearly full tank of gas) was the same at dawn as it was at dinner time.
Maybe the panels were accumulating strength to run the air conditioner and radio, which would not be easy for me. But anyway, it’s not the lost dream I expected. It reminded me of what Telsa CEO Elon Musk said a few years ago, before the Cybertruck: “The least effective position to install solar force is in the car.”
But even if the symptoms didn’t translate into loose miles, it was hard not to want to have them. As I leaned over my laptop, the ceiling was at work, turning sunlight into a maintenance charge that at least helps keep batteries healthy. That’s what I think other people who have GPUs that exploit bitcoins.
And maybe the fact that you can’t drive your car to solar power is a smart lesson. Now that leaving our homes means inviting a small threat of painful death, anything a necessity: sending the next day, well-stocked food, visiting friends in the user, becomes a luxury. It reminds me how much drilling, charcoal chimney and sunlight are needed to force an undeniable boost in the workplace.
The panels give you the challenge of holding on and seeing how much time you can go without driving and how planned it can be. By having to plan your itinerary, you’re better off. This is masochistic with the freedom you get from a gasoline car in general. But this aversion to waste is a detail of the ownership of hybrid and electric cars that I completely understand.
Hyundai is a giant company that manufactures the right cars. Your engineers and accountants would waste no effort on anything useless. According to marketing literature, panels are a “unique design signal”, “a differentiation”. It also made me moan, but that’s not bad. I don’t care if the panels don’t meet my fantasy of a self-contained solar car. They did their homework reminding me that driving is not lazy and that we will have to behave accordingly.
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