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Anyone Familiar with "Go Sun"? It's a portable solar charger for cars. (www.youtube.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/electricvehicles@slrpnk.net
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https://gosun.co/

Basically its a roof rack solar panel with a battery inside (includes AC outlet), extra fold out panels that cover the length of the car, and a charge cable for the car. They're about $5000 USD and are shipping the first ones out in Q3 this year.

As someone who lives in an appt and commutes, this would make an electric vehicle much more viable as there is no charging stations in my building or at my work. I saw this and immediately began researching what vehicle models would be coming to Canada in 2028.

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[–] 6 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Who is emptying an entire battery every day though? For low distance usage it might not be too bad.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Well it would be easy to use up a small EV battery like I was describing (20kWh) but the "normal" EVs these days have around 100kWh batteries so you can just multiply the charging time x 5 to estimate a "normal" EV's charging time on this solar roof.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Other than the extra weight, larger battery doesn't matter.

    If you had a 500MWh battery and it takes half a year to charge it doesn't matter for the solar panel if you only actually use 5kWh a day.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    Depends on the car. My PHEV minivan only does 30 miles at best on electric. It isn't hard to do that just getting kids to all their activities in the morning. I installed a level 2 charger because then we have the evening activities and couldn't get enough charge.

    Meanwhile my car gets 200 some miles on a charge so even the days I use more power than level 1 can restore in a day the next day is sure to be less and so it gets to full charge.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Just looked it up, sounds like Americans drive way more. In the UK I cycle around as much as the average lazy fuck person drives.

    Stats for typical driving distances are comically low. Quite a lot of people would drive distances below 1km.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's about 3 miles round trip to my nearest store with some decent hills and you have to ride on a highway. There is a back way to the store but it's being redone and it's closed right now which will make it safer to bike. Before the construction and when I was single with no kids I walked to the store every day to pick up stuff for dinner taking the back way. Now even when it reopens I'll still probably drive because I usually have to take at least 1 of my 2 young children. If I had an ebike I'd probably take that because I'm not riding my bike up the hills with my kids in tow.

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