Toyota secretly developing solar car?
I guess it depends on what you call a solar car. I mean, a car with some panels on the rooftop might offer some juice, but until we see some major advances in cost and PV efficiency I can’t see how it would make a huge difference. Now, it does make sense if Toyota is looking at ways of better combining solar PV on a residential rooftop with vehicle charging.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see Toyota thinking so far in the future. Here’s a link to the AP story.
UPDATE: As expected, Toyota is denying that it’s building a solar car.
Tags: Add new tag, solar car, Toyota
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:26 am
I’m not sure it’s that far into the future.
Loremo (http://evolution.loremo.com) are hoping for efficiencies of 6kWh per 100km in their electric version. Let’s be pessimistic and say it manages 10kWh per 100km under real world conditions and you drive 10,000 miles per year (16,000km). That’s 1,600kWh per year which can comfortably be generated by a 2kWp rooftop PV installation in northern Europe.
It’s a bit tricky to get that solar electricity into the battery if you’re a commuter though but does it matter if you charge your car using grid electricity but feed the equivalent amount (plus a bit for distribution losses) back into the grid?
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:56 am
well, as much as I’d love this technology to work I have a feeling the hydrogen hybrid cars are going to pip them. I watched a tv programme on them a few weeks ag and I was very impressed with what I saw
January 5th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Unfortunately, with current solar capture products (even concentrated solar-PV) cannot capture enough energy to fulfill more than a 40 minute daily roundtrip. The solar azimuth and the number of solar hours at a given azimuth will dictate capture as much as the urban landscape into which a car is placed that could potentially capture sunlight at all. I think it’s great to have a 60 watt array attached to a vehicle to trickle charge a battery, but that battery is still sized and manufactured without deep cycle capabilities as a 100 amp hour aid to starting a combustion engine. The time slicing with intermittent charging to a lithium ion battery supporting battery storage for mobility applications hasn’t been approached for solar. So far, no one has built a battery at the required energy density and with a short enough charge/discharge cycle to effectively capture enough solar power. Consider that a hybrid car like the Volt doesn’t produce much more than the average car alternator. You’re looking at anywhere between 300 and 1,200 watts, about the fourth of a home gas powered backup system’s electrical output.
The time for putting batteries aside should be apparent. We should be moving into the ultra-capacitor for mobile applications. In my humble opinion, ultra-capacitors are not a ‘disruptive’ technology. In fact, I believe quite the opposite, especially as we’ve all been following EEstor and Lougheed Martin’s connection to motor vehicles through ZENN Car.
Imagine a Volt with a proton exchange membrane, running a desalinated seawater ethanol blended fuel where that fuel is reformed on board the vehicle using plasma arc or supercritical water oxidization. The ultra-capacitor empowers initial load currents that would otherwise be unavailable to conventional and lithium-ion batteries and for which intermittent capture is a very real possibility.
Look at what desalinated water can do to improve the re-use of existing natural gas residential infrastructures over a potential future use of those pipelines for the transport of hydrogen gas to neighborhood homes. Hydrogen embrittlement, gas leakage (our smallest molecule after all) and energy intensive compression requirements put hydrogen out of the running as natural gas supply dwindles in the next 50 years here in the Great White North.
Why not split the vehicle into a home and mobile system, slap a 15 year purchase price on the combo and give the product a 25 year lifespan.
To me, the potential for increasing household income, aiding in electrical distribution network longevity, and creating a self-fulfilling renovation economy on longer product cycles for appropriate products, engenders a future in which the economic web that underpins all activity (energy and resultant work) renders arguments about the transition of manufacturing elsewhere obsolete. The service of the fleet will continue at a different pace and the split of the product where it is sized to the accommodation will repair the rift left behind by the parts of the product cycle that rely on a limited product lifespan and unify the product behind and before the seawater fuel that will meet the needs of government and industry to continue making revenue to ensure the energy and food security of every individual who even now participate in fossil fuel use — every one of us on the planet.
A new platform, this seawater network can roll out beside gasoline and E85. It can entrench ethanol at current production levels without having to expand any further into a conflict with food and water security, and it can solve aquifer depletion where water should already be left to agricultural and human use.
I’ll stop there. If you can see this, please write to me with your different arguments for this idea .
November 11th, 2009 at 6:44 am
I think that it could work anything to rather not use fuels and oils don’t you think, we will see into the future and Toyota may just surprise us all with this and may even have the last laugh.