Sign me up! Lol mathematically that depends on how much you're paying for power. For the math nerds out there I'd be more curious to hear how many days it takes to fill up from zero.
You just need to transport and setup sixteen 400 watt solar panels on a portable carport canopy with a portable battery backup system and you can charge about 6.7kwh for about 5 hours of peak sun a day. This should give you 33 kwh or 66 miles of standard range. More if there is more sun that day.
This could be worth it to do if you want to homestead and live off grid or something like that. But in its current form it just can't be transported. Maybe one day more camp sites will have it or something.
Ford won't do it but it could be an aftermarket opportunity. There are plenty of thin solar applications you see them on backpacks and long before that calculators and watches. As has been mentioned by everyone, the amperage is still going to take a long time to charge but in a down/off-grid scenario could be the difference between serving and ruling.
Seems like it’s only a matter of time before this company would offer that configuration. The model they’re marketing here is meant to apply to the majority of EVs, where they would have to do a roof-rack mount because they’re not trucks or don’t have a big trunk to store it in. It’s 70 pounds, so I think they decided the average person couldn’t handle it well on their own if they had it in the cargo area, or they simply couldn’t make it small enough to fit in the cargo area, and for most vehicles it would take up too much space anyway.
The Lightning is ideally suited for a solar setup like this because we have a ton of storage space and also the tonneau option. What I’d really like to see is a tonneau that can be unfolded to double or triple the square footage.
This sub in general is very anti-portable-solar, so the responses here aren’t surprising, but as usual the responses are comparing the solar output to plugging it in, when the point of the system is to help people who either don’t have access to an electrical outlet or don’t want to use one. It should go without saying that no portable setup will compare to plugging it in or having a solar array on a house or in a field. It’s a compromise between portability and output. I’m elated that we’re seeing this kind of innovation. It helps us all in the long run.
Do I wish it cost less? Yeah. Is it a dealbreaker? Not to me.
The performance would likely not be worth the effort and price.
By my napkin math you'd get a peak of about 350 W from a tonneau cover, with that obviously going down if you're really far north, it's morning or evening, it's overcast, or you're parked in shade. You'd maybe get 5 miles of range on a good day, and less on a bad one.
If it were cheap and durable then that would still be worth it just to be cool, but how many hundreds of dollars is it worth just to look cool? Bed cover panels would be unlikely to pay for themselves relative to residential electricity costs, and at ~5 miles/day they aren't all that practical for most off the grid scenarios, either.
As with Solar Freakin' Roadways, it turns out that solar panels are best put in a fixed location with an optimal orientation for the latitude rather than slapping them on something transportation related.
Now that I took a closer look at this,
Standard range would get you
1200 w over 5 hours or 6kwh.
6/98 = .061
\*240 = 14.6 miles
basically the same if you do ER
(6/131)\*320= 14.65
14 miles is ok if you are say...parking the car and going for a long hike.
The extra drag? Well it goes on a roof rack and its removable.
As someone else said, if you can get this in the form of a tonneau cover or to have this roof one and a tonneau cover, you could nearly double that and get 12kwh or around 30 miles. Maybe a tonneau cover that folds over and can flip open onto the top of the window.
Something that doesn't make your car look totally inoperable would be nice, but the shade is good too.
TBH , I would get this. If you do not use your car everyday the sun will recharge it for you. If you get 15 miles a day and leave the car for a few days you can net another 60 miles and if you have the extender like I suggested that doubles to 120. Not bad for just having it open in the sun in your driveway and while the 3k may seem steep that is pretty reasonable compared to the cost of building a carport array and adding 16+ panels.
Your math is wrong. They state 1200 watts. Presumably, that's 1200 watt hours. Being conservative, lets say you can get 5 hours of charging every day.
That's 6000 watts in a day. You're looking at fully charging an ER range battery in under 1 month. Or to be precise, that would be a full charge in 21.83 days.
Another way to put it, assume Lightning’s efficiency of 2.3 miles/kWh, then inverse is 435 watts per mile. 6000 watts a day divided by 435 watts per mile is roughly 13.8 miles a day. I’ll take that like free beer.
The problem is that $3k buys a heck of a lot of miles charging at home. At least with my electricity costs, that 13.8 miles costs me roughly 60 cents a day. $3k is 5,000 times 60 cents, or ~13 years to recoup your cost.
Yeah. But “off grid” it’ll never get you enough power to get “back to grid”. If you have an off grid cabin you can get a proper set of solar panels with inverter etc for the same price that would generate 3x as much power.
The OP rationalized the purchase by arguing the amount of charge provided on a daily basis. Surely you wouldn't be permanently off-grid with your electric truck?
The use case for "off-grid" doesn't really make a ton of sense either to me. I guess it would be enough to offset your losses running Pro Power camping...but at that point just get an additional camping battery/solar system and cut the truck out of the equation?
Huh? OP did nothing of the sort but instead talked about how many miles per day of off grid charging this provides when you are off grid.
And your post exactly indicates one of the use cases. This might be expensive now but the idea is great.
Conservative would be 3 hours a day. To get even close to 1200 watts you’d have to be parked south facing. With no clouds. No shadow etc.
I have roof mounted solar array with 20 350 watt panels with completely unobstructed south exposure at a damn near perfect inclination for maximum production at my latitude. Today sunrise was at 5:25am and sunset will be 9:55pm. It was partly cloudy. I am on track to produce around 42kWh today. With a 1200 watt array I’d be lucky to get a whopping 7 kWh out of that array on what is almost the longest day of the year. They’re claiming 30 miles a day. Not a fuckin chance. You might get 38 km per day under absolutely ideal conditions at high latitude as long as you didn’t drive anywhere and wanted to take the time to unfurl a 70lb monstrosity on your car damaging paint etc. On a normal 12 hour day you’d get maybe 5kWh. Factoring in weather, suboptimal parking, the need to actually drive the car during the day etc. you might average 1-2 kWh per day. That would allow my Lightning to commute 6-8km in a day on solar or my Mach E 8-12km in a day. $2500 to get 3650km in a year is mind bogglingly stupid. Even in Alberta with our insane electricity fees pushing electricity to nearly $0.18 per kWh it would take over 20 YEARS for this POS to pay for itself. And there is no way it’s lasting more than 5 years.
This reminds me of all the cheap foldable Chinese panels on Amazon that sell under 20 different brands, they don’t put out anywhere near what they advertise. I’ve returned three of them.
Not accounting for price. I can see an application for camping and especially for boondockers.
This would have been nice this weekend while camping. Someone ran into the Rivian EVSE at campsite so rangers turned them off as a precaution. Was hoping to use it last night before heading back. we were little tight on way back home and had to “limit the use of our induction hot plate lol”. No DCFC nearby and didn’t want to go and spend a few hrs at one of the near(ish) lvl2 chargers.
While neat, for $3k, that’s an easy pass.
Just calculated and it would take me 5 years of daily 10 hours of full sun charging in good weather to break even.
Isn’t that like half the expected turn-around time of rooftop solar, though?
Again depends on how much you're paying for power.
I would think at least 20% of us are kind of at least 50% "prepper" and thinking long-term... so there's that.
Sign me up! Lol mathematically that depends on how much you're paying for power. For the math nerds out there I'd be more curious to hear how many days it takes to fill up from zero.
I feel like this would never even charge the amount of extra drag it causes, unless you were parked for weeks at a time.
You just need to transport and setup sixteen 400 watt solar panels on a portable carport canopy with a portable battery backup system and you can charge about 6.7kwh for about 5 hours of peak sun a day. This should give you 33 kwh or 66 miles of standard range. More if there is more sun that day. This could be worth it to do if you want to homestead and live off grid or something like that. But in its current form it just can't be transported. Maybe one day more camp sites will have it or something.
I like the way you think good sir.
If you could put it on top of a tonneau cover behind the back glass, that wouldn't cause any extra drag. The price is way too high though
Ford won't do it but it could be an aftermarket opportunity. There are plenty of thin solar applications you see them on backpacks and long before that calculators and watches. As has been mentioned by everyone, the amperage is still going to take a long time to charge but in a down/off-grid scenario could be the difference between serving and ruling.
Hmm, could the tonneau cover itself be made of solar panels?
Someone invent this please Thanks
Seems like it’s only a matter of time before this company would offer that configuration. The model they’re marketing here is meant to apply to the majority of EVs, where they would have to do a roof-rack mount because they’re not trucks or don’t have a big trunk to store it in. It’s 70 pounds, so I think they decided the average person couldn’t handle it well on their own if they had it in the cargo area, or they simply couldn’t make it small enough to fit in the cargo area, and for most vehicles it would take up too much space anyway. The Lightning is ideally suited for a solar setup like this because we have a ton of storage space and also the tonneau option. What I’d really like to see is a tonneau that can be unfolded to double or triple the square footage. This sub in general is very anti-portable-solar, so the responses here aren’t surprising, but as usual the responses are comparing the solar output to plugging it in, when the point of the system is to help people who either don’t have access to an electrical outlet or don’t want to use one. It should go without saying that no portable setup will compare to plugging it in or having a solar array on a house or in a field. It’s a compromise between portability and output. I’m elated that we’re seeing this kind of innovation. It helps us all in the long run. Do I wish it cost less? Yeah. Is it a dealbreaker? Not to me.
That's what I thought this was!
Lol maybe, i never clicked the link
The performance would likely not be worth the effort and price. By my napkin math you'd get a peak of about 350 W from a tonneau cover, with that obviously going down if you're really far north, it's morning or evening, it's overcast, or you're parked in shade. You'd maybe get 5 miles of range on a good day, and less on a bad one. If it were cheap and durable then that would still be worth it just to be cool, but how many hundreds of dollars is it worth just to look cool? Bed cover panels would be unlikely to pay for themselves relative to residential electricity costs, and at ~5 miles/day they aren't all that practical for most off the grid scenarios, either. As with Solar Freakin' Roadways, it turns out that solar panels are best put in a fixed location with an optimal orientation for the latitude rather than slapping them on something transportation related.
Now that I took a closer look at this, Standard range would get you 1200 w over 5 hours or 6kwh. 6/98 = .061 \*240 = 14.6 miles basically the same if you do ER (6/131)\*320= 14.65 14 miles is ok if you are say...parking the car and going for a long hike. The extra drag? Well it goes on a roof rack and its removable. As someone else said, if you can get this in the form of a tonneau cover or to have this roof one and a tonneau cover, you could nearly double that and get 12kwh or around 30 miles. Maybe a tonneau cover that folds over and can flip open onto the top of the window. Something that doesn't make your car look totally inoperable would be nice, but the shade is good too. TBH , I would get this. If you do not use your car everyday the sun will recharge it for you. If you get 15 miles a day and leave the car for a few days you can net another 60 miles and if you have the extender like I suggested that doubles to 120. Not bad for just having it open in the sun in your driveway and while the 3k may seem steep that is pretty reasonable compared to the cost of building a carport array and adding 16+ panels.
I love that this would cover my commute AND provide shade for the interior.
If you parked for about 4 years, would be able to recharge the battery once.
Your math is wrong. They state 1200 watts. Presumably, that's 1200 watt hours. Being conservative, lets say you can get 5 hours of charging every day. That's 6000 watts in a day. You're looking at fully charging an ER range battery in under 1 month. Or to be precise, that would be a full charge in 21.83 days.
Another way to put it, assume Lightning’s efficiency of 2.3 miles/kWh, then inverse is 435 watts per mile. 6000 watts a day divided by 435 watts per mile is roughly 13.8 miles a day. I’ll take that like free beer.
The problem is that $3k buys a heck of a lot of miles charging at home. At least with my electricity costs, that 13.8 miles costs me roughly 60 cents a day. $3k is 5,000 times 60 cents, or ~13 years to recoup your cost.
This isn’t an alternative to at home charging. “Off grid”
Yeah. But “off grid” it’ll never get you enough power to get “back to grid”. If you have an off grid cabin you can get a proper set of solar panels with inverter etc for the same price that would generate 3x as much power.
The OP rationalized the purchase by arguing the amount of charge provided on a daily basis. Surely you wouldn't be permanently off-grid with your electric truck? The use case for "off-grid" doesn't really make a ton of sense either to me. I guess it would be enough to offset your losses running Pro Power camping...but at that point just get an additional camping battery/solar system and cut the truck out of the equation?
Huh? OP did nothing of the sort but instead talked about how many miles per day of off grid charging this provides when you are off grid. And your post exactly indicates one of the use cases. This might be expensive now but the idea is great.
Conservative would be 3 hours a day. To get even close to 1200 watts you’d have to be parked south facing. With no clouds. No shadow etc. I have roof mounted solar array with 20 350 watt panels with completely unobstructed south exposure at a damn near perfect inclination for maximum production at my latitude. Today sunrise was at 5:25am and sunset will be 9:55pm. It was partly cloudy. I am on track to produce around 42kWh today. With a 1200 watt array I’d be lucky to get a whopping 7 kWh out of that array on what is almost the longest day of the year. They’re claiming 30 miles a day. Not a fuckin chance. You might get 38 km per day under absolutely ideal conditions at high latitude as long as you didn’t drive anywhere and wanted to take the time to unfurl a 70lb monstrosity on your car damaging paint etc. On a normal 12 hour day you’d get maybe 5kWh. Factoring in weather, suboptimal parking, the need to actually drive the car during the day etc. you might average 1-2 kWh per day. That would allow my Lightning to commute 6-8km in a day on solar or my Mach E 8-12km in a day. $2500 to get 3650km in a year is mind bogglingly stupid. Even in Alberta with our insane electricity fees pushing electricity to nearly $0.18 per kWh it would take over 20 YEARS for this POS to pay for itself. And there is no way it’s lasting more than 5 years.
Pricey but really cool.
I just wish I know how they're getting solar directly to vehicle. If I knew how this would be an easy diy you can use while camping
This reminds me of all the cheap foldable Chinese panels on Amazon that sell under 20 different brands, they don’t put out anywhere near what they advertise. I’ve returned three of them.
Not accounting for price. I can see an application for camping and especially for boondockers. This would have been nice this weekend while camping. Someone ran into the Rivian EVSE at campsite so rangers turned them off as a precaution. Was hoping to use it last night before heading back. we were little tight on way back home and had to “limit the use of our induction hot plate lol”. No DCFC nearby and didn’t want to go and spend a few hrs at one of the near(ish) lvl2 chargers.