this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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I mean, it'd be cool to get a couple miles of range here and there without having to plug in. Could make for a nice little errand vehicle in a smaller city where there aren't trees or tall buildings to block light and you just park in a driveway or apartment parking lot. If say the battery itself would be big enough for an 80 mile range, I could see some people never having to plug this car in.
It'll come down to price, of course. If it's cheap, it could be cool and useful. If it's expensive, it's a novelty and would have no practical reasoning to be purchased.
The base model has a 250mi range, and the biggest boi battery is estimated to get close to an 800mi range. The batteries are almost half the size of other EV batteries because of how efficient this vehicle is.
That'll be super interesting if it ends up staying that way.
It will not be cheap. It's going to be the price of an EV + the price of custom shaped solar + the price of R&D + the price of being a niche product and not having the efficiency of scale. It'll be a novelty without any doubt.
Everything takes r and d. Also, it's not "custom solar panels" anymore if you're ordering 10,000 of them. The article stated that supposedly they have a ton of pre orders of sorts. Custom means a one off, or even a few dozen of something. Not thousands.
Everything requires R&D, but doing more things requires more R&D. It's not just an EV, which requires it's own R&D.
Custom means it has one purpose, not that it's a one-off. No one else will be using the same panels they will be, so they don't benefit from the scale of mass-produced panels (and 10,000 is not a large number even if that's the number they have pre-ordered).