Aptera Solar Car
With electric cars becoming more popular and a shift towards renewable energy sources taking place, an obvious question is why don’t we simply put solar panels on top of cars and run it off the sun? Could this help with the lack of charging infrastructure? Realistically, what would it take for solar powered cars to work out, and why haven’t they been successful up until this point?
This video by Engineering Explained will analyze the surface area of a modern car, providing an estimate for how much solar power it could actually generate, what speeds the cars could be capable of, and how long the cars would take to charge.
Engineering Explained took into consideration the solar constant, the amount of solar power that actually reaches Earth’s surface, the efficiency limits of solar panels, the curvature of the Earth (it isn’t flat), and analyze how this impacts a solar car’s performance.