An idea opinions?
 

Ok so I've lurked GasSavers for quite some time now. I haven't joined until now because I really had no way to contribute but now I have a question.

Very quickly I live in South Philadelphia where a plug in hybrid or all electric car would never work. The way the row homes are down here I literally park up my street maybe once a week simply because there aren't any spaces. So as you can see I could never plug my car in.

Now this is fairly annoying because all I drive in is city traffic and I'm talking 100% city no highway at all usually never getting above 40 MPH and stopping at the end of every street which isn't a far distance. So my ideal car would be electric, short distance trips daily that could in the summer drive 60 Miles to the Jersey shore.

So here's my question in case you wanna skip all that text. Telsa Motor's new electric car the sedan they're going to produce seems like a very logical step for me.

With the current problem being the charging, now I realize it would be expensive but would it ever be possible to put solar panels on the car to constantly recharge it? Maybe even while driving? This way I wouldn't have to worry about the fact that I have no way to plug it into my home.

I would think that you could use solar panels to supplement the charge but I don't know if you could get enough to fully charge it.

It seems to need a full 15A of house current at 110V to put a decent charge in a reasonably sized electric vehicle... that's 1650W for around 6 hours.. say 10KWh to keep the numbers easy... now a good panel might get you 500mA at 12V in 2 square feet, that's 3W per square foot... assuming you can charge it for a full 12 hours of sunshine, 10,000/12 = 833W is what you need out of your solar package to charge it in a day... that's about 278 square feet, or about a 14'x20' surface area you need for solar panels... unobstructed, angled to the south...

So I'd guesstimate that on the surface area of the car itself, you'd be able to drive it to near full range once a week if that...

You might wanna look at electric motorbikes or (full size) scooter type things, you may be able to wheel one into your hallway overnight to charge.

Thanks for the math Road, that's what I was really looking for. Topic can be closed now.