Hi, while looking for a good ev for my family, i came across this new KIA van. Its kinda like the VW ID buzz but seems to have more space. When I saw the wide roof I thought, why not but some solar on top? And with some rough calculation I came up with the following. 3 600w/800w panels which generate roughly 15km of range on an average eu day, would fit on top. This would be perfect for my regular driving needs. Has anyone ever tried to add solar to an ev and has anyone experience with this car?
Just looking for general advice on feasibility of solar mods and the car itself.
How did you come up with that? Are you accounting for lost generation due to pointing straight up at the sky, and reduced efficiency due to increased aerodynamic drag?
There’s a good reason we don’t put solar on vehicles, its expensive and there’s not really enough space to make much of any difference.
Looking at that roof, it looks like it’s about 3m x 1.5m, for 4.5 m^2. Typical solar panel gets about 200W/m^2 at max sunlight.
So that’s a peak generation of 900W. With a 24 hour day and a capacity factor of 10%, that’s about 2.16 kWh of energy per day. For a van like that, with the weight and aerodynamics of a bulky solar system on the roof and the systems for storing that energy in another battery and cleanly providing that power in a way that the car charging system can accept? I’d be skeptical that’s good for more than 8km per day, on a sunny day.
That peak though. Which you’ll realistically never reach, much less for 24 hours…
Yeah, that’s why I used a capacity factor of 10%, which is pretty normal for fixed solar panels. That should be enough to account for clouds/weather, nighttime, etc.
The spec say 1.8x3-3.5m 10% seems rather low. 8km is still great tho, i don’t really need more than 30km a week.
Are you talking about the entire width and length of the vehicle? The roof is smaller than the total footprint. Especially because the width of the vehicle includes the mirrors sticking out.
No, it’s pretty high for the use case you describe. Utility scale solar with panels pointed toward the sun tends to achieve about 20-25%, with some American desert installations at 30%.
Home balcony solar tends to get 10% in places like Germany, with the higher latitude and higher likelihood of overcast skies.
Putting it on a vehicle roof would be lower than that.
So 2 kwh per day is optimistic.
So why buy a vehicle at all? Seems like the resources that go into an underutilized vehicle would be better used for things like paying fares on taxis.
You’re better off just charging with 100% utility solar/wind from the grid and paying money for it, rather than trying to combine a mediocre solar array in a costly way that kills your vehicle efficiency.
The specs are 4.5m, I est the front is around 1m. You can put 3 or 2 1.8/1.1 bifacial cells ontop with 450w each. Thats 900-1350w peak correct? Taxis are really expensive where I live. My regular driving is just 30km but i do want the car for going on longer trips as well and occasionally heavier cargo, but than there is no house array charging possible far from home.