Does it elevate somehow? It doesn’t look like it has the ground clearance for actual off roading.
“Off road” but the car only stayed on undeveloped roads rather than actually going off the fucking road.
undeveloped roads rather than actually going off the fucking road.
I’ve driven on some “undeveloped” roads that were worse than actual off-roading.
It was developed and abandoned, but The Rubicon comes to mind.
Europe’s definition of “off road” generally doesn’t include driving over boulders. That’s a uniquely American obsession.
Yes the massive continent has enormous biome diversity, unlike the boringly homogenous and safer soft limp-wrist European country you likely live in.
Would you excuse me, I need to dodge gunfire to shop for groceries. Good day to you.
The tech sounds cool, but that design style is absolutely tragic.
We’ll, the fastback and the fairings on the rear wheels makes sense for aerodynamics, but I have no idea what’s going on at the front.
Prettier than the cybertruck to be honest.
It’s giving off some serious Pontiac Aztec vibes
It’s like if the Aztec and the Cybertruck had an ugly baby.
I love to hate on the Pontiac Aztec as much as the next guy, but it wouldn’t be caught dead with a cyber truck.
They can finally do that Dark Angel sequel series.
Rough Google Maps estimate is at 2070mi.
While the vehicle looks slimmed down it’s nice to know that the solar roof design, such as on the Prius, isn’t a farfetched strategy for quelling range anxiety.
It’s neat to see solar technology go this far. Was there a support team?
A great positive is that it is a very light weight vehicle. The approach angle looks good. It’s cool how it pops open to supposedly live in but I wonder what the interior is actually like. I can’t imagine it is carrying much living supplies, water, etc as it’s a very light vehicle.
Some negatives include terrible ground clearance and a horrendous departure angle. I can’t imagine the break over angle is very good considering the low ground clearance. It also has small tire sidewalls so they couldn’t have aired down much.
All in all, not a serious off road vehicle. I would argue it’s as much of an off road vehicle as a Prius is with a roof top tent on it. It’s just meant to cruise fire roads.
This article is missing some stuff I’d really like to know. How long did this 1,000 km trip take? How often did they have to stop? What was the average range per day? All of the specs that would be great to know are missing here.
Yeah, this really overlooks a lot of stuff.
it seems that the solar car’s rear can be expanded for more space inside
The sun is in front of the car, with the rounded body the largest solar panel wouldn’t be getting a lot of direct sunlight. Solar panels efficiency is directly linked to the angle of it and the sun. But the writer assumes it’s for “space” and not for better solar generation. This level of “journalism” leaves a lot to be desired and feels like a lot of the more important details were overlooked.
Pretty sure it didn’t take long - it has a top speed of 145km/h or 90mph.
Although some of the roads they took were pretty rough and might not be much faster than walking speed at times even in a gas powered car.
It took a month. The guardian article on this made the rounds a month or two ago. You just can’t get enough via solar to run continuously. It has a big battery for sure. Charging rate is just super low.
Edit: please excuse me. 1.5 weeks, not a month.
Considering it’s a Dutch university, I’m wondering how far it’d go in the Ducth weather.
Jokes aside, this is an interesting concept. Wonder what may come of this later on.
Did they have to make it looks so ugly?
To some extent yes, they had to. The roof is as excessively wide and flat to give it as much solar panel surface area as possible.
It’s just a proof of concept, the same techniques could apply to a nice looking car without too much range compromise. But they wanted to do something extreme.
This bit of news made the rounds late October. It’s cool but they go to lengths to, IMO, misrepresent the achievement. It took them 1.5 weeks to do this. It has a great big battery but they give the impression that you can drive more or less continuously from solar alone. No mention in any of the many articles you can read on this (they must all be sourced from the same press release or similar) about charging rates to charge the whole battery. The best you can see is on some of the articles they say cloud cover could impact range by 50km. At what sort of speeds that is based on is up to anyone’s guess.
EarthStar Voyager?
