offgrid electric car (2025)
41 points by gnyeki
41 points by gnyeki
For scale, digging around elsewhere on the site suggests it's using a 12 kWh solar installation. This is a bit on the large side but not excessively so, and it looks like they're not mounted in the best fashion. (I imagine better mountings are A Project For Another Time.) For reference I had a small house with a 6 kWh solar installation that was as large as could fit on the roof comfortably, and it basically provided all the power necessary for the sunny half of the year.
I was thinking about this but for an electric motorcycle. Was wondering if you could add 3 solar panels to a small shed, and use them to charge a small 2kwh battery + the motorcycle when the battery is full. I noticed some cheap(er) woodlands that allows camping and only a (non-permanent) shed. Putting it on a trailer bed seems to be a great way to do this.
Putting it on a trailer bed seems to be a great way to do this.
As in putting a shed and motorcycle on a trailer, going to the camping site, then using the motorcycle to move about? Or pulling the shed with the motorcycle? The latter will completely kill your range, aerodynamics is the great murderer of BEV range.
That aside there are foldable solar panels for camping (a few tens to low hundreds of watts), as well as more modular systems for campers and trailers, so definitely an option but you won't get a motorcycle charge a day out of that. Depending on tech and make, panels will produce 150 to 300W/sqm in ideal conditions (noon, straight facing the sun), count 1~3kWh/sqm/day (in good weather summer) depending on panel. From that, your shed surface, and your battery, you can see how much you'd get for a motorcycle battery.
Thin-film are also an option but while they are lighter, more flexible (literally) and have better low-light performance the tradeoff is significant loss in peak production (~80W/sqm).
Putting the shed and bike on the trailer, take it there and then (semi-permanently) leave it there. The non-permanent requirement is only as in: can't pour a foundation and build on top of that. I would just throw regular solar panels on top of the shed or mount them nearby just like Joey did. As others noted there are lots of models out there and the range is more than enough to go for a ride, especially when not pushing it too much.
I use a portable 150w solar panel to charge a small battery and my e-bikes. I can get ~1kWh per day and it requires zero installation. You could totally make this work with a burley trailer for a bikepacking rig.
That's a really cool idea. Know of any good electric motorcycles out there? The only ones I know of are mopeds designed for cities, and probably wouldn't be the nicest on dirt/gravel roads or long distances.
The is a big market for offroad electric motorcycles that are perfectly suited for gravel and dirt roads. Popular examples are the Sur-Ron and Talaria models (smaller and lighter) or the Stark Varg Ex and Zero XE (heavier). I personally own a Sur-Ron Lightbee since 2019 (for fun, not to commute). Its a DIY and modding-friendly vehicle. Stock battery is good for 30-70km, depending on how hard you drive.
My favorite is the Verge Motorcycle. Most terrifying and fun vehicle experience I've ever had, hands down. Tried the 2024 model, before the solid state battery (which in truth, I find hard to believe). Zero is the classic, and if you happen to be in Africa then I know some of the team at Roam and trust that they'd make a great product.
Running your EV off of solar has been an option for decades. It was just that solar panels were somewhere stationary and EV had to come to them to charge.
This is now changing. You have options for EVs that come with their own solar panes. I read that BYD is starting to offer solar roof on certain models, there's another tiny city car out of China with solar panels on the roof and Aptera is finally starting production of their super efficient design.
Interesting times ahead.
Car roof solar panels are and will always be a gimmick. A fun gimmick but a gimmick nonetheless: the surface area just isn’t there for anything serious even before you account for the poor exposure.
Lightyear used to advertise up to 70km solar range on a summer day for a car essentially covered in solar panels, aka under 10km range per hour of solar charge in great conditions.
It was not a completely unattractive idea to have your car charge enough for your daily summer commute as you were at work (assuming you had well lit open-air parking, and that was before they announced the princing), but at significantly less than a US residential circuit worth of energy it wasn’t exactly mind-blowing either.
Yes, solar roof is a gimmick if you thing of cars as these big, bulky, blocky bricks that we have now. Take such a car, put solar panels on it and you get a gimmick. What you need to do instead is to take solar panels and then build a vehicle around them, such that it makes the most out of limited energy they offer. World Solar Challenge in Australia has been doing this for some decades now and designs coming out of there are simply amazing. Aptera now tries to take that philosophy and build a suitable everyday vehicle. Looks like their approach will hold out and survive while Sono and Lightyear didn't.
World Solar Challenge in Australia has been doing this for some decades now and designs coming out of there are simply amazing.
They're also largely useless as vehicles. HPAs are also amazing, they're not going to revolutionise air travel.
Aptera now tries to take that philosophy and build a suitable everyday vehicle. Looks like their approach will hold out and survive while Sono and Lightyear didn't.
Even if aptera doesn't fail (which is far from a given, given the continuous price increases and production delays), the solar panels remain a gimmick:
built-in solar cells to extend its range by up to 64 km (40 mi) per day.
i mean 42 miles of range in a day best case is more than a lot of people would ever drive their cars. even if that's best case and it only does 20 miles average... that covers a lot of people's daily commutes to and from work for basically free(barring the initial cost of course).
that covers a lot of people's daily commutes to and from work for basically free
It’s “basically free” regardless, even charging at residential rates that’s a buck.
barring the initial cost of course
At 250k, the bar was significant. Because when you can get an EV for under 50k, paying 200 to save a buck a day means you recoup your investment over a cool thousand years of commuting.
Lightyear used to advertise up to 70km solar range on a summer day for a car essentially covered in solar panels
I mean, even if it's much less than that, say, 10km of extra range a day on average for a car not completely covered in solar panels, that could still be pretty great for someone like me who doesn't drive that much most days. I don't have hard stats on this, but i would be surprised if my median day is much higher than 20kms of driving. Reducing the need to think about refueling by half would be quite nice!
Is there any significant downside to having solar panels on the roof your car?
My Prius had a solar roof a good decade ago. It could run the internal fan with if outside_temp > internal_temp as the logic. Worked pretty decently.
But actually charging a multi-kilowatt EV battery... yeaah. no.
Running your EV off of solar has been an option for decades.
I haven't seen any writeups of off-grid life with an EV, so I find Joey Hess' story unique and interesting.