Technology

The road-legal car has a top speed of 145 kilometers (90 miles) per hour. On a sunny day, its battery range is around 710 kilometers (441 miles) on roads, and around 550 kilometers (342 miles) off-road, depending on the surface. In cloudy conditions, the team estimates the range could be 50 kilometers less.

This actually seems pretty good. I suppose those numbers would go down over time and depending on how dirty they are.

Ugly as sin but I’m down if I can drive it mostly solar and plug in when needed in a more temperate climate

Edit: I feel like a lot of you are forgetting it just needs to get you to work, where it sits in the sun for 8-12 hours, then home where it can be plugged into homes or left outside for non-homeowners. If it can build enough charge during that work parking lot for me to get home and then top up on the home charger, that’s a huge plus over just plugging in and eating grid energy all the time. I’m not expecting the thing to have no battery and just convert sunlight to movement like magic jfc….

Powered only by the sun and pure ugliness

There is no actual information on how self sufficient the car actually is. There is only 1 number which states how long the car drives on a sunny day with solar+battery combined.

The car probably needs to charge for days via the solar panels in order to fill up the battery.

How on earth can they get that much solar area power on a car? Many others have tried and it has always said there is just not enough space on a car to generate the amount of solar you need less ultra light, impractical cars. Feels like BS especially since there are no details.

That car looks very funny

Misread headline as “world’s worst off-road solar suv” and thought, “it’s nice there’s enough competition in this space for there to be a worst one.”

Impressive work by the students IMO, a 1200kg EV campervan that achieves a realistic range extension with its solar power roof. Great to see that this is even possible with current solar tech though - I wonder what something like this would look like in the future with more efficient panels.

Let's say this matures, what would be the stand out differences between something like this, and a normal combustion vehicle? The main advantages the combustion has would be really good fuel density (longer range) and no waiting on the batteries to recharge, however the solar vehicle is much more lightweight (harder to get stuck, as mentioned in the article) and requires almost no maintenance... maybe just dusting off the panels after driving through a sandy region

My gosh that’s hideous.

uses “lightweight and robust” composite materials to cut weight

Pretty great as an experiment. I wonder how this would fare in crash tests, whether there's a way to make composites work in practical scenarios.

Of course its the Dutch.

Ok now do british columbia

This is a neat project....and terrible reporting.

Did they start out with any charge? How long to charge it fully via solar? How long it took them to do their trip? You could easily read this and think they did it by driving the full range (one of the few stats they give) out every day unless you're knowledgeable enough to see what they're not telling you. Is that range at 30mph? People are reading range figures and thinking, "well, gee, the EVs I can buy only do X and this does Y!", which isn't comparable at all without how that range is defined. If those figures shouldn't be compared to regular cars, then say it in the article! This is a 20-30 mile a day charged-by-solar-in-the-desert-near-the-equator vehicle, which isn't nothing, but not really as presented. Greenwashing (it's probably not) or whatever this should be called doesn't help the needed planetary shift away from fossil fuels.

Looking for other reporting (where are other commenters finding the duration of the trip?):

Guardian - no mention of time.

bonus: “We hope this can be an inspiration to car manufacturers such as Land Rover and BMW to make it a more sustainable industry. The car was actually very comfortable in the off-road conditions as it is very light and does not get stuck.”

Remind me how it was so lightweight again? Does it have LR & BMW level noise damping? It surely had AC and all that right? I don't know because that info wasn't provided. You don't need to convince LR and BMW, you need to convince consumers to go without those.

Daily Mail - no mention of time

Designboom - no mention of time

Jalopnik - no mention of time, which is disappointing for a car specific site

This is a cool project and it's cool university students did it, but why leave out such a misleading pieces of information? It's bandied about as a "showing people it's possible" thing as in, "you could have a solar car!", but leave out all the bits that really make it possible, like forgoing AC or the daily miles driven. That none of the reporting on this has this information either means [puts on tinfoil hat] it's a vast conspiracy to make green stuff look more palatable [tinfoil off], it's all confluence of interest in making it look more palatable, or the information just wasn't given out, or they're all referencing the same source news-wire style. Frustrating.

Where's the real information? I feel like we're in a race against time to move away from fossil fuels so things like this need to not be misleading.

Edit - I'm stupid, it does say week and a half long...which only proves the point I think in not contextualizing range and such, because that's a long time

Okay now imagine a future where we're able to beam power down from space, which is .

I know it's probably not viable for a million reasons but how cool would it be if this tech truly is viable and the air force is able to develop it to a point where they can start offering it to the public, to support infrastructure, such as in-transit charging, or even just to support rural applications like farming? Would probably help with climate change at least.