Electric car that charges itself
It&#x27;s easy to dismiss this as green washing, but there is some value to it for city cars. The amount of electricity generated is never going to be enough to fully power the car, but that&#x27;s not really the point. If having solar panels on your car roof means you can avoid charging much in summer, that will make owning an electric car for people who live in cities much simpler - and so support adoption.<p>As a back of the envelope calculation, if you covered the ~2.44 m2 roof of a VW ID3 with solar panels you&#x27;d probably see somewhere in the region of 244 kWh &#x2F; year (based on typical UK solar panel generation per year - this would be more in a sunny place). At 4.3 miles&#x2F;kWh that gives you just over 1000 miles &#x2F; year of self charged driving.<p>It&#x27;s true that those same solar panels would be more productive in a static installation. But it&#x27;s also the case in the west that the biggest cost to solar rollout is installation, not the panels themselves. Putting panels on the roof of a car can be done in a factory, with none of the tricky site-specific work that makes costs balloon.<p>In fact, Hyundai are already planning a solar roof option with their Ioniq 5 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interestingengineering.com&#x2F;hyundai-unveils-charger-on-wheels-ioniq-5-with-solar-panel-roof" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interestingengineering.com&#x2F;hyundai-unveils-charger-o...</a>). It will be interesting to see if that has any impact for the typical driver.