That Mobile Lotus system is pretty cool looking... though its footprint is rather huge, I'm not sure why they keep pushing the "mobile" part of it when it weighs 220 lbs and has a wingspan of 18 feet!
Also, the $4k price tag doesn't seem to include the other elements of a car charging system (in the tech specs a storage battery is listed as "optional"), so my guess is that you would have to add several thousand dollars to get a real cost.
I thought I would share the e-mail below from an engineer at Goal Zero, maker of the solar battery systems talked about before. The output of the Yetis is 1.2 kwh, but that decreased power would be no problem for the evseupgrade.com 120V plug, as far as I understand it.
It seems pretty clear that, at two days of solar collection for about 2 kwh of charging, this system isn't feasible except for the most hearty souls committed to solar. But I'm optimistic that with increased demand we will have some more powerful solar systems in the next 5 years. Like most things electric, we have to wait.
From Goal Zero
Direct response from engineers:
First, I thought he had more of a custom home made EV. Didn’t know he had the Leaf.
A 3.3 kW charger is just not going to work with the Yeti 1250 unless it can be scaled down to 1.2kW. When the charger tries to pull 3.3kW it will trip every time. For 3.3kW charging he should keep an eye on products we release in the next 1-3 years as we are working on a solution.
I’m not sure which charger he is looking at from EVSE upgrade. Can the charger scale down to 1.2kW?
Assuming he gets a charger that can scale down to 1.2kW, he would need to increase the capacity of his Yeti system beyond a single 1250. He could either get 3 Yetis (pretty expensive) or 1 Yeti and two 12V 100Ah AGM batteries chained to the Yeti . With this setup and a 1.2kW charger he could get 2.0-2.4kWh into the vehicle over 2-3 hrs. If he chained 4 batteries to the back he would have about 4kWh available and it would take 6-8 hrs.
If the system will be strapped to a dolly make sure that the vents on the sides and bottom of the Yeti have adequate clearance for ventilation.
Now for charging this system – I’ll use the Yeti 1250 and 2 chained batteries for this example. The max input is still 240W and with a highly efficient monocrystalline solar panel like Goal Zero sells you will see about 2/3 efficiency – meaning he would need 360W of solar to keep pushing 240W into the Yeti. With 240W going into the system he would need at least 10 hours of good sun to fully charge. Plan on 2 days for the charge.
I’m not sure this would be a cost efficient setup for him, but hopefully this lays it out straight.
