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Is the roof of a Tesla a solar panel?
Why not? If you park your car for day or two, when you come back it should have more of a charge than when you left it. My $20.00 yard lights have them...
Is there a solar panel on the back of your phone?
Why not?
If you set your phone down on your desk for a while, when you pick it up again it should have more of a charge than when you left it. My $2.00 calculator has one...
Bigger question, why has no one brought this up already? They seem like obvious questions to me.
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The amount of square feet available on an average Tesla roof would be enough for a solar cell with an output of approximately 100 watts...under perfect conditions, mind you. If you parked outside, you might get two hours' worth of perfect solar input. The lowest Tesla version has a battery output of 150 amp hours, up to 250 amp hours for the models with solid roofs (the roadster has 416 amp hours, but a removable targa roof). One amp is roughly equivalent to 120 watts, so, the base model would require 120 x 150ah to charge, or 18,000 watts.
Let's say a solar cell on a Tesla got (2 x 100) + (8 x 50) hours of charging in a day. That's 600 watts. I think you can see that the numbers just don't add up.
https://www.galvinpower.org/how-many-amp-hours-is-a-tesla-battery/
Still, it would be a good idea on a Lucid, because it has a separate battery to supply power to things like the entertainment system. And a solar panel would work great for that.
I'm not really a greenie, more a techie and engineer. But, the Aptera is the only production 'car' (3 wheels) that has solar with 700W of solar max power. They say you can get 40 miles of 'free' driving on that on a perfect day. Tesla cars are much heavier and power hungry-er than the Aptera and their team decided it wasn't worth it from what I read.
led lights and lcd displays don't require much juice. when you start getting into radio antenas, electric motors, heating elements, etc. number get out of that kind of low-scale ballpark. Your LED monitor probly uses less than 100 watts an hour, your electric mister coffee probably uses close to 2000 to make a full pot of coffee in less than 30 minutes.
More efficient to have them on your house so the car doesn't have the extra weight.