If you and all your stuff weighs less than 60 pounds, and plan to do all of your driving in the afternoon in the desert in July – a solar powered car may be exactly what you are looking for.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Having your students make a solar car is also worthwhile. If you are a university looking for grant money.
Except if you want AirCon in that car . . .
Just make sure you got an electrical outlet handy for the cloudy days. Even the deserts have them.
O.T. but related:
I awoke this morning to here the media praising Elon Musk for releasing all of his patents into the public domain, which about illustrates their value. The media were so excited and saying how this is a masterstroke by Musk yada, yada, yada.
The media actually believe that a Tesla vehicle contains some kind of advanced unique technology that other car MFR’s covet.
to hear
I’ve been saying for years that this con-man is just trolling through the patents from the 1850s-1930s & republishing them with trivial changes. His “it wouldn’t be hard to build a flying car” thing was yet another proof that he’s as dim as an empty socket (there’ve been flying cars since the 1930s at least, the problem is that most people are already bad enough at piloting in 2D, let alone 3).
You’d be shocked at how much the trendies revere this modern day PT Barnum.
Oh I’ve run into them when I call out Musk for the crony capitalist he is.
Watch them really squirm when telling them how it’s well known how to keep Li-Ion batteries from dropping below their critical charge level and how Musk couldn’t hire an engineer who knew this had to be done. No warranty coverage for a design screw up that should have never happened. No Li-Ion BMS should allow the cells to drop below critical charge levels. It should cut off the power at some threshold above it.
My sister is married to an engineer who can’t for the life of him seem to see through that shifty bastard’s marketing team. I mean, I think my brother in law is a great guy, & he’s smart & has a degree in a useful field, but he just seems to blank out & accept what Popular Science & the NYT say when it comes to Musk. Which kinda reminds me of another greasy grifter.
He’s a pretty good marketer. People won’t buy $40k Chevy Volts, but they will pay 6 figures for Teslas. He figured out that many don’t really care about saving money on running their vehicle, but they will pay lots of money to feel good.
It’s not how you feel; it’s how you look.
Maybe take all his design except the powertrain and drop a hemi in that bad boy and you’ll have something.
Bob Lutz is way ahead of you… http://jalopnik.com/the-murky-future-of-bob-lutzs-fisker-conversion-compan-1501222098
Bob Lutz for President!
This might seem to go hand in hand with this ‘aura’ surrounding Nikola Tesla, who has managed to continue his legacy far beyond the grave.
If one actually looks at the timeline of technology here and overseas, one can see that Tesla was not the only AC proponent, nor the first. Some allege his ability to read several other languages gave him a leg up reading, or instance, German patents and other works written in Europe, which Tesla recognized for its commercial value.
The whole car is “designed for purpose”, rated the best ever by CR and other significant reviewers, and their batteries are (so far) about half the cost per unit storage, and have 2-3X the total of the nearest competitors, and almost to a person, buyers swear they will never buy another gasoline/diesel car. Any they now own sit neglected with both their tires and batteries going flat, getting driven only rarely, almost out of pity. And, and, and …
They’re doing something, or many somethings, very right. But copying them would be suicidal for ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) mfrs.
Several years ago I was in Adelaide on Victoria Square touring the solar cars that had competed in the yearly Darwin to Adelaide race. Off to one side were the remains of a solar car that had been blown off the road by a gust of wind. After musing over what I had seen I realized that most of the solar cars in the race were simply air foils attached to paper mache “like” carriages. Not a very comforting thought.
I have an antique bike-axle buggy. I turned it into a solar power car that runs fine on cloudy and rainy days.
Sunshine===> photosynthesis====> grass =====> Horse.
It is even UN approved because it is highly sustainable. The horse not only fertilizes but waters the grass.
I remember following with some enthusiasm the first solar race thingy in Australia (what was that, 1988?). Even then it was fairly obvious that those designs would never amount to anything practical: they (the race teams) aren’t doing the research to improve the solar panels, which is the only way to make something that you can use to get groceries.
Maybe pairing up solar with wind might provide the ultimate answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1D6h4Kjn0w
Reblogged this on Climatism.
Toyota has solar panels on their Prius as an option but those panels create so little real electrical power they don’t even attempt to charge the battery pack when the car is parked. Instead the panel powers a tiny electric fan that keep fresh air circulating through the interior so the temperature doesn’t go above 120 degrees or so.
That’s still a pretty smart idea because cooling a boiling hot car interior takes a hell of a lot of electricity and kills the battery very quickly. The more electric power is used to drive the car instead of cooling it the less gasoline it will use. But one or two panels on an actual car will never drive it, even if you leave it in the sun all day it will make no difference in fuel economy.
edward1968 June 13, 2014 at 4:30 pm
Toyota has solar panels on their Prius as an option but [1] those panels create so little real electrical power they don’t even attempt to charge the battery pack when the car is parked.
…
Instead the panel powers a tiny electric fan …
That’s still a pretty smart idea because [2] cooling a boiling hot car interior takes a hell of a lot of electricity
Do you see any conflict between those two statements, [1] and [2] above; any possible inconsistency?
.
I mean once you get in and start moving. Temperatures inside a car can get above 190 degrees if left in direct sunlight all day. If there is a fan pulling outside air in the entire time the interior will not get that hot so it will not take as long or as much power to get to your comfort level. Less power going to the air conditioner mean more power to move the car.
Fully aware of the dynamics; living near Dallas Tejas (which is further south than Los Angeles BTW) makes one fully aware of the power of the sun …
I live about the same latitude as LA. We get snow regularly. 😉
NE is about the same latitude as England. But the colonists 400 years ago were not prepared for the NE winters!
It’s mangled writing but such a fan is more for the comfort of getting into a slightly cooler car than the too small to see over the noise fuel economy gain.
Down here is Suhccolina, we just leave the windows cracked open a little.
Up heah we hire lobstahs to sit in our cahs holding ice cubes from Canada.
Oh, My you even got the accent correct. ROTFLMAO
Yeah, but anything that is solar powered even if it doesn’t really do much IS JUST SOOOO FREAKIN’ COOOOL./trendie greenie
Audi had that same kind of thing as an option in their high end v-8 sedans since the early 1990’s. The solar panel was built into the sun roof. The car got something like 18 mpg, It was for comfort, not some kind of Green thing.
I hear that large Govenment grants have recently been contracted out for development of a new, revoutionary green product, the solar powered dildo.
That is the favorite boondoggle of Nancy Pelosi and Rosa DeLauro photo
The photo is from this article at Huff ‘n Puff Rosa DeLauro wears Awesome Outfit to Congressional Photo Op
If you had any doubts about the truthfulness and neutrality of Huff ‘n Puff that article certainly puts them to rest. You would almost think the piece was satire!
Gail,
Those photos were….ghastly!
What is that?
She’s a visitor from matayaya’s Mad Max future.
Not only does Rosa DeLauro look like a wicked witch, she is one. She went from barely middle class to one of the wealthiest in Congress. Most $$$ is from his husband’s private consulting companies.
Rosa DeLauro is the one who was pushing the “Food Safety” Bill for the UN/WTO for more than a decade. Her husband is Stan Greenberg, a very dangerous globalist, well worth watching.
Stan Greenberg
was a strategic consultant to the Climate Center of the Natural Resources Defense Council on its multi-year campaign on global warming ……NGO board memberships include the American Museum of Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, The Africa-America Institute, the Citizens Committee for New York City, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Refugees International…….Republican pollster Frank Luntz says “Stan Greenberg scares the hell out of me. He doesn’t just have a finger on the people’s pulse; he’s got an IV injected into it.”
Greenburg is definitely the power behind the throne of many countries. Stan Greenberg provides strategic advice and research for leaders, companies, campaigns, and NGOs trying to advance their issues.
Greenberg Carville Shrum directed Campaigns in 60 countries including Bolivia That fiasco was documented in the film “Our brand is Crisis”
An Ad for Greenberg’s new book states “The fascinating “war room” memoir of a political pollster and how he helped forge the agendas of five high-profile heads of state”:
“As a hired gun strategist, Greenberg—a seasoned pollster and political consultant— has seen it all. In his memoir, he recounts his work with President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and South African president Nelson Mandela. Through his experiences aiding the leaders in pushing their visions for better and clearer domestic and international policies, Greenberg offers an insightful examination of leadership, democracy, and the bridge between candidate and constituency. This captivating tale of political battlegrounds provides an inside look at some of the greatest international leaders of our time from the man who stood directly beside them.”
Greenberg writes for the Democratic Strategist and also formed Democracy Corps He is also connected to D?mos or at least was in 2008.
Hmmm, Demos spelled with the accent Dem s doesn’t show.
That special script is for all who believe in CAGW, and Nik-from-Where-ever-his-head-is-now who finds it hard to know when I’m serious.