adric22
Well-known member
I'm just curious if Nissan were to outfit the Leaf with solar panels as an option, what people would be willing to pay for them.
I'm thinking if they put them on the roof, the dash, and the hood they should be able to get at least 200 watts out of them. So if my math is correct, that should be about 1 kwh every 5 hours. So a whole day in the Summer sun (assuming approx 10 hours) would get you about 2 kwh. So I'm thinking that would give you a maximum of 10 miles of range each day, for free. That is about my entire daily commute. If you didn't drive the car at all, you could probably charge it up completely from turtle mode in 10 days or so.
Just looking at my daily commute which is slightly less than 10 miles per day, I could essentially drive my Leaf to work and back without ever plugging it in. That is assuming it wasn't raining or overcast. Not that this would save me a bundle of money since it costs very little to charge up my Leaf every day. But I'm thinking about situations where people live in apartments that do not have the ability to charge there. My best friend, for example, lives about a mile from his work. But he lives in an apartment and his work will not allow him to charge either. He rarely drives anywhere else besides work. A solar-powered Leaf would actually work for him. On those rare occasions he needed to drive further, he'd have to find some place to plug in. Or, he might be able to recoup the charge over a period of a couple of weeks being that he would accumulate more charge during a day than he would actually use.
I see this as being a real possibility. The same idea could obviously be applied to a Prius. My wife's 2010 Prius has a solar panel covering half of the roof and most people don't even realize it is there because it is blended so seamlessly with the roof. It generates 60 watts and is just for running the cooling fan.
The question is, what would everyone be willing to pay extra for such an option?
I'm thinking if they put them on the roof, the dash, and the hood they should be able to get at least 200 watts out of them. So if my math is correct, that should be about 1 kwh every 5 hours. So a whole day in the Summer sun (assuming approx 10 hours) would get you about 2 kwh. So I'm thinking that would give you a maximum of 10 miles of range each day, for free. That is about my entire daily commute. If you didn't drive the car at all, you could probably charge it up completely from turtle mode in 10 days or so.
Just looking at my daily commute which is slightly less than 10 miles per day, I could essentially drive my Leaf to work and back without ever plugging it in. That is assuming it wasn't raining or overcast. Not that this would save me a bundle of money since it costs very little to charge up my Leaf every day. But I'm thinking about situations where people live in apartments that do not have the ability to charge there. My best friend, for example, lives about a mile from his work. But he lives in an apartment and his work will not allow him to charge either. He rarely drives anywhere else besides work. A solar-powered Leaf would actually work for him. On those rare occasions he needed to drive further, he'd have to find some place to plug in. Or, he might be able to recoup the charge over a period of a couple of weeks being that he would accumulate more charge during a day than he would actually use.
I see this as being a real possibility. The same idea could obviously be applied to a Prius. My wife's 2010 Prius has a solar panel covering half of the roof and most people don't even realize it is there because it is blended so seamlessly with the roof. It generates 60 watts and is just for running the cooling fan.
The question is, what would everyone be willing to pay extra for such an option?
Even here in sunny southern California, very few cars will have 10 hours of "good" sunshine i.e., maximum potential with no or very little shading. Also, apartments are usually multi-story units which are densely packed, producing shadows galore, or worse parking in a structure...
