You can buy several EVs with solar panels as an extra option, but to fully charge their batteries, you’d need several days of direct sunlight.
I remember some prototype EVs with solar panels. They wouldn’t survive the smallest crash, nor would their occupant. I think they were also single occupant.
They certainly can. However, solar panels are best used where sunlight is ample. Since a car goes through shady areas too, it’s efficiency isn’t much. It is way less compared to what power a car needs. Solar power plants have perpendicular sunlight for most amount of time and also reflectors (mirrors) are used to increase the amount of light that falls on those solar cells. Also, they’d be incredibly inefficient in polar regions. In equatorial regions, if they’re cheap, installing on rooftop of a car can be thought about if their weight is lesser or comparable than the metal on top of car. If their weight is more than that of normal metal, more petrol will be used which would be worse.
Too little surface area to make a difference cost and weight wise.
Same as those gimmicky phones or power-banks with solar panels build in.
Have you heard of the Sono Sion? https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/
Electric cars do not have solar panels because when solar panels are on cars, they are only converting 15%-20% of the energy from the sun. The solar panels would only give about 3 miles of energy in one hour of charging. This is very inefficient and currently doesn’t make sense to use on electric cars yet.
This is how a car would look like if it would efficient … unusable in the real-world…
