657
‘World’s first off-road solar SUV’ just drove across Morocco powered only by the sun
(edition.cnn.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
657 points (95.8% liked)
Technology
59370 readers
4491 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
I believe they were comparing the weight to a conventional electric vehicle, not an internal combustion engine.
Did you see the pictures? It's like the size of a sedan. Campervan seems a stretch.