Solar Cars Are Still Far From Reality

You know, for the most part I had only used cars and I liked the opportunity to change cars about once a year and buy profitably. After reading the article about the 2021 honda pilot, I got the idea to buy this car in the salon and I hope that my dream will come true. After all, the automotive industry does not stand still and you always want to try something new and cool.

The Youtuber's point was that Aptera's numbers work. Don't go by clickbait titles.

A former colleague of mine in China owned a Kandi K27. He took his car to the body shop and put solar panels on his car flush with his car rooftop to create less drag (...because he initially had it on a roof-rack. The roof-rack with the panel would cause way too much drag at speeds above 45 km/hr). He was able to regain 12 km of distance daily from the sun, and that was only from his roof. Last I spoke to him he was considering placing flex panels on his hood to complement the rigid panels on his roof. He anticipated this would give hi another 4 km. This is for a car with a much smaller solar surface area and with a much higher drag coefficient. Now enter the Aptera and you can see how this use-case throws out the window the FUD this YouTuber us slinging at the community with his nerdy talk. 😂 Thank you for sharing. 😁

I don't appreciate his "Safety" implication simply because the Aptera is light-weight. My Mitsubishi Mirage is about the same kerb weight and yet it got better safety ratings than cars which were considerably heavier. The Aptera will have a much stronger vehicle cage than my Mitsubishi Mirage or any other 4-wheeled cars in the sub-compact category for that matter. So, why single the Aptera out for its weight, unless he has a "thing" against light cars in general. Plus, the Aptera offers not only much more protection than a motorcycle, it will protect you more than an whole lot of cars which are already on the road.

Ya, & the grid will be all-green in a few years, WELL within an Aptera's lifespan, & there will be solar on every roof & outlets everywhere & DC nearly everywhere. But in the mean time for us renters who can't install home solar, many with no home or work outlet, Aptera's solar option makes owning a BEV much more practical.

I beg to differ. It is down to semantics on whether the panels need to be installed on the vehicle. My brother and a few friends charge their Tesla's off of their home's solar panels for basically free solar energy. Their cars are solar energy powered.

Aptera appears to already have a strong case for the claim:

They say they parked one on a roof for an extended period (a year, I think), at various compass headings, so that's a real world solar generation test.

They've been driving the prototypes around for a while, so that's a real world power use test.

High level math with just a few factors taken into account. Reality is significantly more complex and rather than point estimates, ranges for the values would be more accurate. BUT, does give quantitative support for Aptera claims. Would be interesting to see how Aptera calculated support for the claim. If I was to do this in a lab I would use a simulation with a variety of distributions to represent the factors being incorporated in the estimate to get a range of predicted values with confidence intervals for each of the predictions. Then I would do real world testing to see how closely actual performance under a variety of conditions tracked with the simulated values. That would be a strong case for the claim

Nice how his conclusion is opposite from the title in the case of Aptera.