any solar powered electric cars on the market ?

 It would be nice to buy a complete package (car, easily removable
battery and photovoltaic panel)- with a good warranty; rather than
have to piece together my own, with no assurance of reliability.

   Mike   misterfact@yahoo.com

  I suspect it'll be a looonnnggg time before you see a practical vehicle,
at least one using solar pv.    Even assuming you'd settle for a vehicle
  that would be totally unsafe to drive in traffic (so as to keep the
weight down), you'd need several horsepower to run it.  Let's say 10 Hp.
At 746 watts per horsepower (aauming perfect coneversion, which isn't
possible these days), That's 7.5 Kw per hour to operate it.   Think
about the size of solar collector it would take to collect even half
that energy.  Even consider letting it sit in the sun for 10 hours and
drive it only one hour.  Of course, the longer you have to let it sit in
the sun, the more weight you have in batteries, etc..

I don't think that many (if any) of the current lot of experimenters in
this area is ready to take on the liability of "selling" you one of
their efforts, much less trying to get past safety standards testing.
   If you ar only interested in sidewalk-running scooters, etc., the
safety part may be different story.  But, with sidewalk-runners, where
do you put the collectors without pushing everyone else off the sidewalk?


I am not anti-solar, rather  just reasonably looking at the field as I
see it.
If I have this wrong, I'm sure a correction will be soon to follow,
Pete Stanaitis
--------------------------------------------

misterfact@yahoo.com wrote:

 Maybe solar thermal would be a better possibility.

 Perhaps a systemized concept is more practical. The system would consist of
an electric car and a charging unit at a residence consisting of solar pv
and a charging circuit.

 Blue Cat wrote:

Perhaps a more modular concept is more practical. One module could
consist of an electric car with a built in charger that could plug
in to any common electrical outlet. Another module could consist of
a grid-tie solar PV system that also plugs into any common electrical
outlet. A third module could consist of a large UPS that also plugs
into any common electrical outlet and can provide power when there
is no grid available.

Anthony