I was watchting this Dutch documentary last week about the Lightyear company which is situated here in Holland and builds rechargable cards with integrated solar panels in the roof and hood.
The concept of this car is that while you can driving the car gets recharged which means you electrical charging time at home will be reduced to only 20%. The idea is that when the majority of all cars will be electric, there will be major electricity grid issues because of peak usage. An effective solution for this is reducing the charging of cars and that is what Lightyear was looking for.
Businessinsider
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Maybe one of the reasons why I am intrigued is because the technology behind this was discovered here at our own university in Eindhoven who always were competing in the Solar challenge which is a race in Australia (this year in Marocco) where student teams design solar cards which drive all through the country only using solar power.
The Dutch student teams were always preforming extremely well in this, and it is not only about the power of the solar panel, but also about the efficiency and aerodynamics of the car. While these cards always look really different than a conventional car, the techniques behind this are extremely useful in the technology development.
Then this Dutch dude decided to start a company with the idea that these cards should be available to the whole world in a reasonable price, and they are actually developing this. And the cards as you see are starting to look a lot more normal. Or are we getting more used to the idea of the aerodynamics?
Topgear.nl
Will these kinds of thing be the future? Maybe they will. Let's just hope this will be scalable enough for the normal John to also have access to these kinds of things. What Lightyear want to promote most is that even in rural areas where there is no power grid or gas pump, you still have the option to drive your car, because it will recharge by the sun. This idea on itself is genius.
I do wonder what will happen in places like Alaska with snow and cold making the battery preformance a lot worse in there. But we are not at that point yet. First this will all roll out in warmer countries and then even a country like Holland which is often cloudy I am curious to see what happens in there.
Lightyear. Surely will continue to follow what these guys are doing because this just might be the future.
insideevs
You can watch the documentary here although this in all Dutch, I'm not sure if there are subtitles in different languages honestly.