The owner of a Tesla Model and has filled his roof of solar panels to load “up to 100 km”. It is not a good idea

He Solar car It’s like gold for the electric car. There, all wishes will be fulfilled: we will load our cars free of charge. End of the bonds of electric and oil forever.

But we are so far from getting something like the gold appears in our lives. Different companies have proposed to experiment with the solar car and even sell their own models.

Toyota, with the PRIusit filled the roof of it so that its plates would help the electrical components of the car. Mercedes, in his EQXX visionhe has played with the same idea. And, despite everything, from Sttutgart to Silverstone, a trip in which they toured more than 1,200 kilometersthey barely managed to extend the autonomy of the vehicle in less than 50 kilometers.

But the Marketing From a solar car is very far. In the PRIus He contributed little. The Mercedes is a prototype designed to look for the limits of efficiency, both in aerodynamics and in chemistry of its batteries and consumption of its engines, so it is not too representative either. The 3.57 kWh recovered by the solar panels yielded much more in a vehicle of these characteristics than in a street car.

Sono Zion, one of the most advanced projects, He ended up canceling. Those responsible for Lightyear, who said they were able to travel for free 70 kilometers daily with their solar car, have also ended by Lower the blind. In fact, since the vehicle was announced in 2019, its managers did not stop lowering expectations and, with them, the number of kilometers per year that the car could travel thanks to its solar panels.

But all this has been no impediment to the owner of a Tesla Model and that ensures in Reddit having made your electric SUV a much more efficient vehicle thanks to some solar panels distributed along the ceiling.

Figures that, of course, you have to take with tweezers.

Putting it in quarantine

As he has counted in a thread of Redditthis owner of a tesla model and ensures that he has designed a system of Foldable solar panels that allow you to load every day between 30 and 100 kilometers a day.

In the presentation of his project, the user explains that the panels are folding and installed on the roof baca. He assures that in this first version, the panels stand out about 27 centimeters from the ceiling of the vehicle but that, in a new version in which he is working, he will reduce the height to about 15 centimeters, improve the flush and create a carbon fiber support To lighten the set.

In total, the Tesla Model and can carry in the future, always according to the user, 4,000 W packaged On the roof, which once deployed can recover part of solar energy, transform it into electricity and recharge the car while it is parked.

But many doubts arise here. First, he assures that He is working So that the solar energy is transformed into electric and goes directly to the car battery so, we understand, for now the energy is stored in a battery that subsequently recharges the vehicle.

The other great doubt that arises is about the true efficiency of the whole. In 2019Toyota created a prototype of the PRIus that filled the entire roof, the rear window and the hood of the solar panel car. A surface that generated 860 W. With them, Toyota said he could travel some 45 extra kilometersbut they were based on the Japanese homologation cycle, much more lax than Europeans.

In the case of Tesla Model and, the weight of the panels touches the maximum of 75 kg that in the United States can move on the ceiling, so it will irremediably affect consumption. First of all, those 75 kg of weight, which is more or less like going with one more person in the car. And, much more critical, for the impact on automobile aerodynamics, which would be very damaged. The creator says that he has not calculated the latter but believes that consumption worsens at 10%.

All this has led some Work reviewers To affirm that the car can barely travel a little more than 40 kilometers under real circulation conditions. That without entering into the impact that the solar panels have on the dynamics of the vehicle and the march comfort, because it must be difficult to ignore the generated noise.

In Xataka | The accounts (impossible) to get an autonomous solar car that is recharged only with sunlight

In Xataka | This electric SUV moves only with solar energy. And just arrived at the Sahara after traveling 1,000 kilometers

Photo | Somid3

*An earlier version of this article was published in January 2024