[liamkinne]

Stop putting solar panels on cars. It’s just not worth the cost or complexity.

That square meter of PV is going to get you at most 250W in perfect conditions. Conditions that aren’t found in cities or even at ground level in residential areas.

[thejohnconway]

Their page addresses that point, it says the panel will charge for 20km of driving in a day, and the average micro car does 12 (not exactly sure what a micro car is though...). Not having to plug anything in is actually a pretty big deal in many European cites where people do not have garages, and on-street chargers are still sparse.

I don't know if this will work, but things like this deserve some consideration.

[blamazon]

> not exactly sure what a micro car is though...

A popular modern example is the Citroen Ami: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_Ami_(electric_vehicle)

Vintage, the Isetta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetta

[bryanlarsen]

There are two main classes of microcar in Europe. This particular one is classified under L6e in Europe, so has a maximum design speed of 45km/h.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classi...

[mysterydip]

I would be concerned about finding a sunny enough spot in a city to charge. Even their promo video showed it sitting in the shadow of some building.

[sidewndr46]

there are these things called garages. People in many places have them. In big cities, you usually wind up parking in one. They tend not to be made of transparent materials.

[thejohnconway]

That’s literally in my comment. Here is London, for example, garages are rare, and nearly everyone parks on the street or in their front yard.

[throwbadubadu]

Start putting solar everywhere possible. It depends on lot of factors, not every city is built the same, and even in non-perfect conditions power collected is just a monotically increasing function over time.. cost and complexity always go down with more mass adoption.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Besides the fact that it probably charges enough to keep operating most of the day, the swappable batteries makes it better than existing micromobility solutions that need to be picked up and recharged. With these a service vehicle can just drop by and replace the battery in 60 seconds. If they partner with gas stations in their cities, people could do it themselves. This design is very exciting

[mike-cardwell]

If you're going to attack the idea, at least address the bits of the page that talk about the thing you think doesn't work:

> Even in northern countries like The Netherlands the sun gives enough energy for average urban use. The solar panel can charge up to 20 km per day in Europe. The average micro car usage is around 12 km per day.

[komali2]

It's just really frustrating to think a path we might go down, after trying cars for 100 years, is using (sure, small) cars for daily trips of 12km. We're going to maintain travel and parking infrastructure, for 12km trips? Really? That's so much space that could be reclaimed.

I'm not a big fan of scooters but most taipei trips cap out around 10km. A scooter takes a 1x.5 meter spot at home and in the city, and in lanes of traffic we stack three to five wide while moving. They still don't beat busses, trains, bikes, or walking, but they're a damn sight better than a private car no matter the size. If you're concerned about rain, you can wear a rain jacket like hundreds of thousands here do without issue.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Bikes and scooters do not replace all use cases for cars. We need alternatives. This is one of hopefully many more.

[komali2]

So to clarify, it sounds like you think maintaining the good parts of modern society requires cars? Can I challenge you on that?

First, I'm curious generally where you live. As a Houstonian, I once certainly couldn't imagine life without cars. After all, how else could I visit my friends in Pearland, accessible only by freeway and 30km away? Then I visited Paris and saw that there were different ways to build cities, and that how you build a city dramatically affects how you can get around it.

If you've been to a city like Houston and a city like Paris, do you think we should build more cities like Houston, or more like Paris? To clarify, my perception of Houston is hot concrete and freeways as far as the eye can see. The downsides of this was no freedom of travel as a child, inability to do more than one or two activities in a day, being angry for 40 minutes twice a day when I was commuting to work, and everything being really far apart because most space in the city is dedicated to parking. Whereas my perception in Paris is that children can get around without depending on their parents, a commute could be as simple as walking and sitting on a train (allowing for reading a book or something), and a much denser selection of activities to choose from.

That's without even mentioning the incredible harm to the climate cars and freeway building cause.

If you believe Paris style cities are better than Houston ones, would you also be open to the idea that building even better than Paris could allow us to get rid of private cars entirely?

I can maybe guess at some initial objections so let me add some caveats:

There's plenty of places far away that it doesn't make sense to run bus routes to all of them, probably renting a car is a good solution for these rural areas. I thought it'd be interesting to build car depots at major metropolitan edges, so as density decreases to some amount people can grab a car for their rural destination, and rural visitors can easily drop off their cars when they visit the city.

Obviously, for those with mobility issues, a transit system must be inclusive.

And of course, a city should still be designed in a way for emergency vehicles to get around quickly. Though, the less private cars on the roads, surely the better response times emergency vehicles would have? Not to mention the less busy they would be...

What do you think?

[JKCalhoun]

For myself, I'm a scooter fan as well.

I remember seeing a lot of dedicated motorcycle parking when I lived in California, none here in the Midwest. Having dedicated parking for 2-wheels would help for people scratching their heads about picking up an electric scooter.

[bryanlarsen]

It's a €‎6000 car. If that solar panel is significantly adding to cost and complexity, it's not being reflected in the price.

[bryanlarsen]

Their marketing claims 1kWh per day when perfect conditions would give 1.5 - 2 kWh, so they're not misleading anybody.

[SamBam]

How many charging stations are in a typical European city?

The point of this is that it can be introduced in any city, anywhere, without needing to wait for charging infrastructure to catch up.