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 Nativeinabush
Registered: 06/11/10
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 Solar panels on cars 
#13041306 - 08/12/10 02:43 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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So I as thinking, cars run on gas, which cost a lot of money and in the end with be a contributing factor in global warming.
So why dont we put solar panels on cars? That would solve the whole problem. ALl they need to do now is find a way to transfer solar energy gained from the solar panels and transer it to a source of power that can power the car, right?? And think about it, this would be good for so many reasons. See, we depend on these third world countries that we are at war at with? They say it isnt, but the fact is that this whole fucking war, and all these fucking people dying, is but nothing but for fucking oil...And if we do the solar panel thing, we could stop the war and would completely cut them out from America, and war would be over n shit. I think theres a few cars out there that already have them, but it needs to be on every car.
WAIT! I just thought of something...Seeing as the government will no longer be able to get our money we spand on gas, so instead of buying the solar panels and mounting them on your car, the government will create businesses and services that make you pay monthly for the panel. Sort of like a cellphone. Cause the government is fuckin gay as hell dawg.
So' thats my idea. yay or nay?
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on speed and weed and little e's
let's get high and talk to trees
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 twighead
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Izz cloudy outside today... Can't go to work 
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ModusPwnd
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Nay.
They are too expensive and heavy. You end up hurting the environment, consuming more gas and wasting money.
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twighead
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: ModusPwnd]
#13041351 - 08/12/10 02:52 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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It's a work in progress I'd say - once the battery/panel technology is there I'm sure it'll be done, but it wont be in the US... many european countries are a good ten years ahead of the US in panel technology... and there are already solar powered cars.
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Nativeinabush
Registered: 06/11/10
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: ModusPwnd]
#13041354 - 08/12/10 02:53 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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twig, just because there isnt good weather doesnt mean it cant work. While the car is parked somewhere on a nice day it would charge the batteries and store it so it becomes potential energy. And that ebergy would be able to run the car for a day or two.
Modus, they are not too heavy, And yes they are expensive but it would be a gradual thing. And tell me, how do we hurt the environment? The sun is an unlimited amount of energy source. Oh an, how do we consume gas? Thats the whole point of the whole thing.
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Sex Drugs and Rock and Rave
letsgetsmashed&misbehave
on speed and weed and little e's
let's get high and talk to trees
Life's a trip and then you die
So FUCK this world
& Let's Get High
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ModusPwnd
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: twighead]
#13041362 - 08/12/10 02:54 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Once the battery technology is there we wont need panels on the cars.
The solar cars that exist now are very expensive, impractical prototypes.
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RoosterCogburn
Fearless,one-eyed U.S.Marshall
Registered: 08/25/06
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: ModusPwnd]
#13041374 - 08/12/10 02:56 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Solar is only good in some places... They have panels for my Prius, but it's only viable if you are in the far southern US (or near the equator). Not all sunlight equals energy, you need the right angle.
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based
Registered: 02/12/09
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the solar panels on a prius are good for powering a fan to keep the interior cooler.
Solar panels are also quite bad for the environment (so are batteries that are used in cars - the prius is notorious for that.)
It's all about driving style anyways. You can get more mpg from a bmw m3 than a prius as proven by top gear.
they explain it perfectly. If you wanna be mr eco friendly, ethanol is there it's at. Friendly when it burns off, friendly to produce (effectively liquid sun) and cars with an ecu tune and changed fuel lines (not that hard/expensive) can run off it. Some will need bigger injectors/stronger fuel pump but whatevs. I know with my car I can plug my computer in and tune it for 100% ethanol easy. It's illegal to do though, e85 is the highest allowed. Reason? Nobody has said why it's illegal, just is
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Nativeinabush
Registered: 06/11/10
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: bbl337]
#13041446 - 08/12/10 03:08 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Ill tell you why its illegal its illegal because its another excuse for the government to kill us. Did you see the documentary about the government and FDA putting all this shit in our foods and stuff that it solwly kill us? Its basically poinson, not the scorpion kind. Its all a fucking conspiracy bro.
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Sex Drugs and Rock and Rave
letsgetsmashed&misbehave
on speed and weed and little e's
let's get high and talk to trees
Life's a trip and then you die
So FUCK this world
& Let's Get High
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karma35
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If this was even remotely possible, don't you think someone would have done it by now :-)
To put things into perspective, if you covered the entire top of your car in solar panels, you might be able to generate 200 watts in full sun. (Do a quick Google search for solar panels and look at the dimensions and wattage.)
So over the course of an hour, the solar panel will provide 200 Watt-hours.
By comparison, a gallon of gasoline will provide 36,000 watt hours.
Say you drive 50mph, and you have a car that gets 25mpg. In an hour you've gone 50 miles and used 2 gallons of gas.
So... roughly speaking it takes around 70,000 watt-hours to go 50mph for an hour.
Your solar panel generates a measly 200 watts-hours in the same amount of time.
200 watt-hours vs. 70,000 watt-hours... A 350-fold difference, and bear in mind that a single 200 watt solar panel costs around $1000, which means you're looking at $350,000 worth of solar panels.
And then bear in mind that your $350,000 car won't be able to drive on cloudy days, or at night, or through a forest, or a long tunnel...
In short, totally impractical. There's a reason we're still burning fossil fuels. Nothing else even comes close to the same efficiency when it comes to transportation.
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WakeboardrB
Pepe Silvia
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Solar panels are nowhere near efficient enough to provide enough power to drive the average passenger vehicle. It's not a fucking government conspiracy, it's just that the technology just not there yet.
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Same thing happened to me when I played Neil Armstrong in Moonshot. They found me in an alley in Burbank trying to re-enter the earth's atmosphere in an old refrigerator box.
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: karma35]
#13041483 - 08/12/10 03:14 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
karma35 said:
If this was even remotely possible, don't you think someone would have done it by now :-)
To put things into perspective, if you covered the entire top of your car in solar panels, you might be able to generate 200 watts in full sun. (Do a quick Google search for solar panels and look at the dimensions and wattage.)
So over the course of an hour, the solar panel will provide 200 Watt-hours.
By comparison, a gallon of gasoline will provide 36,000 watt hours.
Say you drive 50mph, and you have a car that gets 25mpg. In an hour you've gone 50 miles and used 2 gallons of gas.
So... roughly speaking it takes around 70,000 watt-hours to go 50mph for an hour.
Your solar panel generates a measly 200 watts-hours in the same amount of time.
200 watt-hours vs. 70,000 watt-hours... A 350-fold difference, and bear in mind that a single 200 watt solar panel costs around $1000, which means you're looking at $350,000 worth of solar panels.
And then bear in mind that your $350,000 car won't be able to drive on cloudy days, or at night, or through a forest, or a long tunnel...
In short, totally impractical. There's a reason we're still burning fossil fuels. Nothing else even comes close to the same efficiency when it comes to transportation.
I believe it's MIT, I could be wrong though; but, someone came up with the technology to make solar panels vastly more efficient. The way they work now, is the light travels through a prism once and that is where it gathers the energy. They managed to make a way for it to bounce around in that prism for a LOT longer. Not saying I believe in solar at the moment, but I don't think it's useless
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RoosterCogburn
Fearless,one-eyed U.S.Marshall
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: bbl337]
#13041484 - 08/12/10 03:14 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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I love folks who think Priuses are enviromentally unfriendly. I'm pretty sure all those articles were debunked. My favorite was the insane one that compared a Prius to a Hummer... I guess you believed that, huh? 
I get about 46 MPG by doing nothing special, and I fuckin' love it.
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ModusPwnd
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My 15 year old, $3000 dollar car gets 33 MPG - FTW.
Buying a prius is bad for the environment now, but it is often looked at as a way to subsidize and push to new, future technologies.
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Nativeinabush
Registered: 06/11/10
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: karma35]
#13041514 - 08/12/10 03:19 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Whoa man so many numbers. You make a good point.
I'm not necessarily saying that we need to do this right now. We could give it 20-30 years for the technology to get there. But we will eventually get there.
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Sex Drugs and Rock and Rave
letsgetsmashed&misbehave
on speed and weed and little e's
let's get high and talk to trees
Life's a trip and then you die
So FUCK this world
& Let's Get High
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JT
Registered: 03/01/07
Posts: 6,950
Loc: athens
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: bbl337]
#13041520 - 08/12/10 03:20 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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ethanol by itself is great, but it's got problems too. making ethanol takes a ton of energy, and it uses up food resources. we are one of the top corn producing nations in the world, but consumer prices for corn products have still risen considerably over the last 5-10 years as the demand for ethanol has grown.
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based
Registered: 02/12/09
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Quote:
RoosterCogburn said:
I love folks who think Priuses are enviromentally unfriendly. I'm pretty sure all those articles were debunked. My favorite was the insane one that compared a Prius to a Hummer... I guess you believed that, huh?
I get about 46 MPG by doing nothing special, and I fuckin' love it.
Not all of them were debunked  Toyota did try to improve the manufacturing process though since that top gear video was made. But, still proves the point that it depends on how you drive. I drive a tuned car that burns pretty damn rich (you can smell me a few cars back) and I can still manage about 28mpg if i keep the revs low around town. I also get the option of 0-60 in about 4 seconds when I want and get about 17mpg then. A prius does 0-60 in about 11 seconds and they get 17mpg. Just doesn't make sense to me.
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based
Registered: 02/12/09
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: JT]
#13041547 - 08/12/10 03:24 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
JT said:
ethanol by itself is great, but it's got problems too. making ethanol takes a ton of energy, and it uses up food resources. we are one of the top corn producing nations in the world, but consumer prices for corn products have still risen considerably over the last 5-10 years as the demand for ethanol has grown.
Brazil largely runs their cars on ethanol with no problems
And, while I'm thinking about it, the prius should have done formula 1 esque KERS. None of that engine charges the battery crap, just save the energy done by braking
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 anunnakian
Registered: 07/16/10
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Loc: State of Jefferson
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: JT]
#13041566 - 08/12/10 03:28 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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I'll pass, they look a little cramped to me.
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karma35
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Re: Solar panels on cars [Re: bbl337]
#13041576 - 08/12/10 03:30 PM (2 years, 9 months ago) |
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Heh. Every year or so there's another story about MIT or Caltech or [insert university here] coming out with some new solar panel prototype that will increase efficiency by xx%. This has been going on for decades, but it never seems to materialize into a product that you can actually but.
Not that it matters in this case though: There's a limit to how much energy you can get from the sun over a given surface area, and it's around 2500 watts in the two square meters you have available on the top of your car. This isn't an engineering problem; it's a fundamental limit. There's just not any more energy than that coming out of the sun.
So even if someone managed to design solar panels with 100% efficiency, you're only going to get 2500 watt-hours mounting them on your car.
It takes 70,000 watt-hours worth of gas to drive for an hour, and you have 2500 watt-hours *at best* coming from your solar panels.
Even if you manage to build some super-sleek vehicle that reduces the energy need by a third (say, to 25,000 watt-hours over the course of an hour), you're still an entire order of magnitude short with your 100% efficient solar panels: 25,000 watt-hours needed, 2500 watt-hours generated.
If you've ever seen the solar-powered "cars" that come out of the tech schools (or independent inventors), they're a far cry from what you think of when you imagine getting in a car with a friends or family and driving to the store for groceries.
Running anything like today's cars on solar is not just impractical; it's totally impossible.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not bashing solar here. Solar has it's place, but the top of your automobile ain't it :-)
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