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by driverdan 335 days ago
It doesn't make sense to power any vehicle with onboard solar. There are no electric RVs yet because the batteries required to have any amount of range are cost prohibitive and heavy.

I put 1800W on my RV and that's covering the roof end to end. I'd guess it'd be enough for something like 1-2 miles a day on an electric drive train, assuming you don't use power for anything else.
1 comments
masklinn 335 days ago
> I'd guess it'd be enough for something like 1-2 miles a day on an electric drive train

It's probably more 10~20, possibly as much as 30, if it's a long and sunny summer day FWIW.

For references:

- the F150 lightning gets close to 2 miles / kWh on average, ~1.5 at highway speeds but as much as 3~4 at consistent low speeds

- on the other side of an RV, Volvo markets their FH Electric (cabover semi) for 1.1kWh/km — 0.7 mi/kWh — at 80km/h (50mph), DAF/Innovate UK's Battery Electric Truck Trial yielded similar results (1.08kWh/km over 287000 km), it's also close to the numbers of the electric trucker in their very recent MAN eGTX video (0.83 kWh/km = 0.75 mi/kWh)

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driverdan 333 days ago
It averages something like 12mpg diesel. This is a 25' long, 16k lb vehicle. There's no way it would get 2mi/kWh. 0.7 mi/kWh sounds closer to what it'd be.

But that's assuming you use no power. When I was living in it I was using 50% to 100% of the solar output a day.

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