Free charge
- Thread starter BLUEMAYHEM
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When you say "free charge" you might get a free charge for your accessories while camping, but not so much juice for a giant EV truck battery. You also need to consider wiring, a switch panel, monitoring and converting solar to something like a small car battery (all of which take storage space and add weight). It's not impossible, and people do it on their own with trucks all the time using panels like the Renogy 100W and an AH battery pack. Good ideas here: https://forum.gofastcampers.com/t/show-me-your-solar-set-up/713/125
I just wouldn't expect this to be something Scout does - more aftermarket.
I just wouldn't expect this to be something Scout does - more aftermarket.
I was just thinking if your truck is parked all day at work, why not take advantage of it. I would also expect it to be an add on.
It's not "free"...you have to pay for the panels, wires etc, opportunistic but not "free" and the amount of energy added is a micro drop in the bucket
Just to give you some sense of "scale" for how much juice it takes to drive any BEV/PHEV around:
Let's assume you could somehow fit 750 Watts of Solar on a truck tonneau cover.
This, by the way, is VERY optimistic; some space will be lost to the trifold mechanism, the edges of the bed and latches, etc. My rooftop solar arrays (455W Monocrystalline PERC panels) get 19.45 Watts per Square Foot. That would be 668.6 Watts on the 34.375 Square ft Terra Bed (75" wide by 5.5 ft long), but we'll assume some advancements in monocrystalline panels that get you up to 750 watts on the bed.
A Truck bed is flat, and isn't angled right relative to the sun. The loss isn't huge for not being angled correctly, but gets worse the further north in latitude you go. Phoenix loses about 7% for being flat; Billings loses about 14%; let's take a happy middle with an easy number and say you get a 10% loss in the rated panel output, so we're down to 675 Watts of actual production on a Terra Tonneau cover. Not too shabby, right?
Let's assume, optimistically, that the Terra BEV has a 130kWh battery planned. For back-of-the-napkin math on solar installs, we assume 5 hours of the max panel wattage. Realistically, you get more hours than that, but not all of it is "peak sun" hours (in fact, almost none of it is), so it shakes out that if your panels are in the sun all day long, you get about 5 hours * panel wattage = X kWH of production a day. For our 675 Watts of panel, we're going to get 3.375kWH of production in a full day. That's about a 2.6% charge on a 130kWh battery.
"Free", sure, but it really isn't gonna do much to just have panels on the tonneau cover of the Terra. It really is just a drop in the bucket for how much power it takes to get a vehicle around town on a regular basis (also, bear in mind, most BEVs get the equivalent of 80-100 MPG; Gas is super energy dense, it's just not terribly efficient to get that energy *out* of it).
If you're interested in a vehicle that does that you should look up Aptera. That's what they're building but in order for it to actually work the vehicle has to be super-optimized for it as you'll see when you click the link.
https://aptera.us/
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