Comment Re:Overheard (Score 1) 27
You don't seem to realize that this car has the lowest drag coefficient of a land vehicle. Your side mirrors are as bad as this whole car. They began working on this decades go using a GAS engine, it was not an EV!
It's so great that SOLAR can drive it 45 miles per day but that was not the purpose of making the most efficient car ever. You can have smaller batteries which means they charge faster and it costs less to charge it; a side benefit is bugs don't go splat so it doesn't need as much cleaning. The solar marketing gimmick actually has real results even if they are are minor - but for people like me, it'll save me from plugging it in most the year! I go days at a time without driving and when I do it is not 45 miles; I won't need perfect days of sunlight when I only go out a few times per week.
NOTE: This car does 100 Miles/kWh so you are not getting 5 miles per hour at level 1. I get that on my Leaf which is rarely 5 Miles/kWh (4.5 winter, 4.9 summer) and I do that annoying other drivers who are not paying enough for gas with the wasteful way they drive. I used to hypermile and almost doubled my gas savings.
I ordered a NO solar model of the car but they dropped that option. I asked. we asked. They said it cost them too much to set that up and actually saves me little money over the non-solar covering. Their work on hardened curved PV panels resulted with them inventing and patenting solar tech which will be used in other places (they only have 1 customer for those so far.) Yes they are not the best PV but they are better than other curved panels I've seen over the decades and they are being sold and they won't easily break.
I'd rather pay for more PV on my roof; and if I saved $300 on the car without PV I'd still get it on the car just because it's a cheap upgrade. Lithium batteries do not wear out if you keep them above 60% charge. Worth it. For $1000 extra, I think I'd skip it for house PV which is what their estimated add-on cost was initially. If you have micro-inverters etc. you don't get hit as bad with shading. Me, I wish I could go 1000V and have an inverter which could do a wide voltage range because I think that would handle shading far better. but 600V seems to be peak and everything is geared for lower; and oddly microinverters are more reliable... so I have those.