606
‘World’s first off-road solar SUV’ just drove across Morocco powered only by the sun
(edition.cnn.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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There is no bullshit. they claimed 620 miles in a week and a half off of just solar power. The converter they used is 97% efficient. They just hid the week and a half travel time.
If I calculated this right, assuming it drove continuously, they were only able to travel at around 2.5MPH with this thing?
Most likely the car was parked during the day and charging from the sun as it would take hours to charge even a small battery. They then drove at night/early evening/late afternoon over a couple of hours at around 30mph until the battery was empty and repeated.
If it was 10 days of driving with an average of 62 miles a day, that only needs to be a very small battery even compared to even a gen 1 Renault Zoe that has 22kwh. They could probably get away with 15kwh or so (approx. 4 miles per kwh), which would make charging it off car sized solar panels possible in a day.
Majority of Europeans only do very low daily mileage. The UK journey average is only 8 miles. So this car works for those sort of use cases, although there are always going to be outliers who need more, so good job there already cars that cover them.
I imagine the car wasn't moving for the entirety of the 2 and half weeks. Drivers probably had to sleep.
Even accounting for 10 hours a day to rest, that still only comes out to an average speed of 4.4MPH over 10 days. This is obviously mostly charge time I'd imagine, but you still need to account for that time when you're embarking on a trip.
I'm curious how much of that really is charge time. They may have left it charging all through the daylight hours and then drove 60 miles every evening.