I'm calling outright BS.

30watts per hour =10% of my cars power consumption?!! Cars AVERAGE 40kw/ph that's more than 3 orders of magnitude more. Even if the Prius were twice the efficiency of an ICE it's still a massive difference.

Now if you were to leave the car in the blazing sun for the entire day. Collect 240watts, how long would you have to drive for that to make up 10%? Like say 16.6 minuets worth of driving. (of which solar power garnered 1.6 minuets)

But I GUESS you could get better millage if you went down hill.

Sorry to pick nits, but the Green Car Congress blurb and the Solatec page both mention that the output voltage is 18V and the output current (I think they mean 'power') is 30W. As a sometimes pedantic engineer, I don't feel we can have a serious discussion about energy use if we don't use units of measure correctly.


At any rate, it will be interesting to see this product come to market.


ED: noted and changed. Thanks for keeping us honest!

A 30 watt charge going into the 12v battery on a prius is not going to give a 10% gain in fuel mileage. The prius uses a 200v battery pack to supply energy to the electric motor and uses a 12v battery to supply power for boot up of the computer, and to run your standard car accessories like radio, cell phone chargers, etc. 30 watts of power would be the equivalent of turning off a loud stereo--I doubt people have seen 10% gains from doing this..


If you want to spend some money and maybe make a tiny difference, take that $2195, buy ~300 watts of PV at $5/watt, a $500 grid-intertie inverter, and use the extra $200 to put toward install and misc supplies, and you'll have 300 watts of power feeding the grid. You can probably get some tax breaks on this too.

Panels angled for your latitude and season, or better yet with active tracking would put to shame any system sitting on top of a car.

Suppose the one-way commute home from work or school is gridlock for 10 minutes to the freeway, 40 minutes at freeway speeds (all gasoline) and then 10 minitues more of gridlock to home. The Prius' computer, having gotten feedback that the battery is "topped off", can rely more on batteries during that 20 minutes of stop and go. If you look at the gain in that short non-freeway mode it may be 10%, but over the entire hour long commute it is likely trivial. The real problem then is one of cost effectiveness. When thin film SPV material goes down an order of magnitude in cost this could make some sense for a city driving situation but surely never on the highway. Cool then to think of having cars customized for the type of driving one does.

This is almost a scam. When you press on the pedel on the Prius you are summoning up to 33,000 watts of power just for MG1. It does not always use 33,000 watts, but often 15,000. So in full sun 10 hours those panels will add 300w hours or you can run MG1 on them for about 1 min. Thats right one min power for MG1 at half load. I figured you would need a 1000w array to make much difference, and batteries to hold that charge similar to the 'edrive' system. This might give you 30 mins of electric driving .

Pricing: COMPLETE solar systems for RV's and boats run about $15 a watt, so why is this incomplete system $66 a watt?

Even if the claims are true, it is a bad deal. A Prius owner getting 60mpg and driving 12,000 miles a year would use 200 gallons of gas. If Solatec gave you a 10% boost you would get 66mpg using 182 gallons of gas. That 18 gallons is worth $45 at $2.50 a gallon, so you would have a pay back period of 49 years!



For this to be worth it, it would have to at least pay back the cost in 5 years, which is how long most people keep a car. Gas would have to average nearly $25 a gallon over the period to make that pay!

The last comment on average life of a car in original ownership. My comment is those who trade at 5 years are foolish.

Our Prius was purchased at the end of January this year. It qualifies for the $3150. tax credit. This is about 15% of cost. Bottom line is that there was no trade, and our old machine was 16 and had 150,000 miles (250,000 km). Worn out; it is junk. This is typical of all vehicles we have owned over forty-five years of marriage.

We invest the difference. And we never finance cars. House, yes, nothing else. As an aside I asked the finance guy how many Prius buyers have cash. Rough estimate: something over half. That says something about those of us who choose to save fuel.

duke

If you're figuring cost savings, I agree with duke. Figure them for the life of the car, not trading in a perfectly good car. Throwing away a car is a huge waste of resources.

Also, don’t forget that we pay the bulk of the price for gasoline hidden in our tax bills. When you figure the cost of fuel, try using the real number of about $12-$15/gallon.

Don’t believe me though. Check out the report. It’s nicely broken down so that if you’re skeptical about specific sections, you can subtract out the numbers you choose not to believe.

http://tinyurl.com/2g3pq4

this is BS... but it is a good idea.

the panels could power the car's radio and sound system.

could enough panels power a fan or small air conditioning system?

...Ultimately you'll use the solar panels on the car to charge you battery, which is supplying water-fuel as hydrogen power to your car, to DOUBLE your Mileage

This one gives 215Watts to a supplemental battery.
Seems way more practical than 30 watts but still is cost prohibited.

http://www.solarelectricalvehicles.com/