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[Phmcw]

The problem of direct solar powered car is that you can only harvest the energy from the light that hit your car roof, which is not much. Electric car are another story.

This idea of a world wide wifi network is not especially new,  but is bound to give you a slower Internet.

If you want a global internet, ask your government. I'm not too fond of the privatization of the national telecoms company : it has only been trouble here.
A national teecom network running on taxes is a better idea I think.

[Grakelin]

The problem of direct solar powered car is that you can only harvest the energy from the light that hit your car roof, which is not much. Electric car are another story.

Sure, which is why significant levels of advances in the technology are required before it is viable. Everything Kogan said about this subject is just second hand pessimism and stubborness. Saying that solar powered cars are a pipe dream because our culture loves oil and everybody uses oil cars is like saying that nobody would accept recycling because it takes too long and nobody recycled in the 1800s.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Sure, which is why significant levels of advances in the technology are required before it is viable. Everything Kogan said about this subject is just second hand pessimism and stubborness. Saying that solar powered cars are a pipe dream because our culture loves oil and everybody uses oil cars is like saying that nobody would accept recycling because it takes too long and nobody recycled in the 1800s.

Nah, nobody recycles because it is too much effort to sort garbage when sorting only nets you a small pittance for your effort (or, as in the case of my area, you have to pay more for the privilege of sorting your garbage.)
Everything I said regarding solar cars was repeating things I've heard people claim as to why it hadn't happened if they were so good. I also said there was a reason, I never said what that reason is. If you ever figure it out let me know, and we can change the world!
I think it's stubbornness.

(Edit:
I'd like to know...

This idea of a world wide wifi network is not especially new...

Can you show me? I'd like to see where previous concepts of this went. I assume there are some kinds of records of attempts or discussions about it somewhere.
Thanks!)

[Nikov]

Household waste recycling has no profit motive for the household, and we see it done pretty half-ass. Scrap steel recycling has a huge profit motive, and the majority of steel poured since WWII has been recycled scrap IIRC. I sincerely think one day the profit motive will be there to strip-mine landfills for metal reclaimation and naturally found WALL-E to have an untenable premise. Also, metal has been recycled on a large scale since the bronze age; the profit motive was there to reuse worn out bronze, so they did.

Solar powered cars are a pipe dream and its not because we love oil. Its because the solar power is so ineffective on a good day and useless on a bad day that free energy isn't worth being stranded at the side of the road during every rainstorm. Honestly, I think most Americans would gladly switch to an electric car if it both looked, handled and sounded like a gasoline car while still charging its batteries as fast as you could fill a tank at a gas station and had the same range. The truth is they don't, electric cars are inferior to gasoline in all respects but fuel price, and people consider the fuel price a worthwhile cost for having a vehicle that doesn't feel like a toy. Meet the needs of a consumer for a good price and you'll see electric cars everywhere.

And I was speaking about unregulated internet assuming it would be about the same as HAM radios were; personal tools to send and recieve on personal expense. Of course, central nodes in the network handling a lot of traffic would require higher upkeep costs. I also spoke about propaganda since in countries like Iran and China, the government is cracking down against online expression and collaboration against the state. Not all propaganda is printed by the party in power, after all.

[qwertyuiopas]

Solar powered cars:

Calculate the average energy of sunlight during an average day, to hit a one M² area.
Calculate the average surface area of a car to be in the sun at an average angle.
Calculate the average power required to move a car.
Multiply the first result by the second and then compare it to the third. If the third is higher, a purely solar powered car is impossible without power storage. Otherwise, it is attainable as long as the efficiency of all involved technology is 100%, or less depending of the ratio.

I suspect, although not knowing the numbers involved, that a purely solar powered car would be possible but current unattainable due to insufficient energy conversion efficiency (sunlight -> [storage ->] motion) and not enough social desire to create a market for such a vehicle.

Still, an electric car with power storage for up to 400 KM and potential solar generation of half of what it requires to drive at average efficiency would be fairly good, as the solar power would extend the potential distance, it can still recharge during the day when not driving, and long travel, when the power storage would be most depleted, tend to be on faster roads where efficiency would be better than average.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Honestly, I think most Americans would gladly switch to an electric car if it both looked, handled and sounded like a gasoline car while still charging its batteries as fast as you could fill a tank at a gas station and had the same range. The truth is they don't, electric cars are inferior to gasoline in all respects but fuel price, and people consider the fuel price a worthwhile cost for having a vehicle that doesn't feel like a toy. Meet the needs of a consumer for a good price and you'll see electric cars everywhere.

The problems boil down to cost (mostly of the batteries), capacity (of the batteries), charge time (also for the batteries), and a complete lack of charge stations (also for the batteries) in modern electric cars. Maintenance is easier, handling is better, acceleration is better, sound is greatly reduced; every problem revolves around the batteries.

Hydrogen is a pipe dream, however, because it has exactly the same problems (except for the fueling times), except fuel cell cost and fuel capacity is drastically worse.

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[Grakelin]

The reason it hasn't been done yet is because it isn't viable by our current level of technology. You might as well try to tell me that ALL solar power is a pipe dream.

[Muz]

Everything is a pipe dream. Quantum mechanics, solar power, space travel, recycling, speech processing, 4G networks, IPv6. I propose we fire everyone in those fields and tell them to work on something useful, like hybrid vehicles and 32-core processors.

[Grakelin]

Those are pipe dreams, too. Let's just make them work the fields.

[eerr]

don't worry, solar powered cars will become viable when we run out of gasoline.


What? nobody mentioned infrastructure!

we have millions of cars and thosands of supporting gas stations.

companies which build and maintain cars are scattered all about with various factories, outlets, mechanic shop ect.

How many factories do you think we have building solar panels? high-power batteries?

Even if solar cars were economically viable, the adoption will be slow.
Affordable ? hahahahahah.

[Eugenitor]

Solar-powered cars? Difficult. There's a competition involving them, but the cars are very stripped-down, the competition is held in the Australian desert during the summer, and, well.. see for yourself.

Electricity-powered cars like the Tesla Roadster, getting their energy from massive solar arrays? Happening right now. (But in very low amounts. The amount of solar-donated energy to the average Tesla plug-in is miniscule.)

Sure, you can have solar panels on the top of the car to add a small amount of juice to your existing batteries, but you can do the same thing with bicycle pedals if you have the nerve and the stamina.

[JimiD]

If you want to read about renewable energy and viability of solar power, and its use in cars and a grid, I suggest http://www.withouthotair.com/.  Its the online version of a book.  The author is a Cambridge scientist who runs some simple numbers on different renewable energy sources and estimates how much of each Britain would need to have to have no fossil fuels.  For transport, manufacturing, the lot.

Also includes a chapter on cars and electric cars.  As a note, there are increasing numbers of electric cars in London, where the limited range is less of an issue, and they benefit from exclusion from the Congestion Charge and Parking fees.  There are also a small, but increasing, number of charging points in parking bays in central areas.

At present the renewable proportion of the UK or any grid is low at present, the carbon reduction benefit of electric cars comes when their electrical supply comes from a low or zero carbon grid.

[Muz]

I've personally worked on a solar car. I've got friends and idols working with international companies to bring electric cars to consumers. My line of work is in doing standard regulatable Internet and finding ways to break it. I find this thread horribly offensive

Solar cars aren't really viable on a mass production scale, though. Silicon cells are good, cheap, and improving gradually. Gallium arsenide is the stuff used in solar races (by less ethical teams), but dear god.. gallium arsenide is a nasty compound and do more environmental damage than fossil fuels. Fricking expensive, and an even rarer resource too.

But I'm willing to believe that silicon cells are capable of becoming effective enough to power whole countries (at least the sunny ones). It's not going to be easy, but hey, if we went with everything that was easy, we wouldn't even have the Internet. I mean, c'mon, this thing has massive underwater cables, signal repeaters in space, and quadrillions of bytes going around the world at half the speed of light. Half of it being porn and copyright infringements. If you told someone in the 50s that this would be possible, they'd think you were crazy. If you even told them that telephones wouldn't have wires or someone would have a computer in their city, they'd still think you were crazy, because computers were not economically viable.

[Kogan Loloklam]

I don't know, we've sort of reached diminishing returns on solar technology. I think I read somewhere we are even a tad more efficient at it than plants are. I don't think we'll get much more out of solar than we have now.

More important than Solar Power is batteries. Most people don't drive their vehicles so much that a solar setup that could go over where they park couldn't power it. The problem is always batteries, which is the domain of Electric cars. That's where you want to look. Of course a decent battery for a solar car costs more than I've ever paid for a car, or most of my immediate family has. I think I know one person who paid that much for a car, but he was a little crazy...