Solar Cars: The Future?: Solar Articles: Eco20/20

Solar Cars: The Future?

Solar power is gaining popularity as the coal crises and the oil crisis gain momentum. Solar power is also gaining popularity due to the quick advancements made technologically due to research. As smaller and more lightweight photovoltaic panels are invented and new materials are found to work efficiently at a fraction of the cost, solar energy becomes more easily accessible, and may soon be able to power vehicles.

The main debate at this point over the validity of solar cars being the vehicles of the future is the dispersion of power created by photovoltaic cells. While these cells can produce a large amount of power, they cannot store much. Also, at this point, the photovoltaic cells are not powerful enough to create enough of a charge to run the entire vehicle with all the auxiliary processes running as well as the engine.

One debate over this idea is the weight of the battery pack. Remember, however, that cell phones were also predicted to never make it in the market due to their bulkiness. Yet research was not stopped, and in the United States, the majority of households no longer use land lines. There are many who believe that the use of solar power on vehicles may indeed make the same sort of advancement, until solar vehicles become the norm rather than the exception.

While there are no cars on auto dealerships that are fully solar powered, there have been many built by individuals over the years. The Bluebird, circa 1977, and the Quiet Achiever, circa 1982, were both completely operational on nothing other than solar power. These are mentioned as two of the first ever solar vehicles. Several automobile manufacturers, however, are now moving towards solar hybrids. The solar panels are placed on the roof and can run up to twenty miles on the electric charge converted from the sun's energy. Add these solar panels to the plug-in hybrid and fuel dependency could be almost eradicated for today's modern vehicular world. These solar panels that are currently in use on cars such as the Prius are averaging two to three hundred watts of energy. Researchers are working to find a way to increase the open space available for a larger number of photovoltaic panels. They are also working on ways to increase the solar input from the sun on cloudy days when the rays don't reach the Earth as strongly.

As more advances are made in the research field and technology increases to advance as well, vehicles could be completely solar powered, or solar hybridized in the near future. These new advances for reducing petroleum, oil based gasoline may yet prove to be an environmentally safe, economically sound answer for moving into the green energy future.

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