Solar-Powered Cars and Trucks Are Almost Here

Telo Trucks says its optional solar-panel system can provide 15 to 30 supplemental miles a day.

A handful of startups will soon sell technologies that can power a substantial portion of a driver’s daily mileage with nothing but abundant, free sunlight.

Aptera Motors needed automotive-grade solar panels that could conform to the sinuous curves of its radical new EV, but the Carlsbad, Calif.-based automaker found there weren’t any good options. So it decided to make its own.

In the process, it kicked off a cottage industry of U.S. companies aiming to make everyday vehicles solar-powered.

Now the company is poised to ship a $40,000 car as soon as next year that can get between 15 and 40 miles of range a day from the sun alone—and can run for up to 400 miles between charges.

The key to this innovation isn’t solar panels that are better at turning sunlight into electricity. Existing ones are already pretty good at that. The real unlocks are the innovations that have made today’s EVs more efficient, and new power electronics to get energy from the sun into their batteries.

Engineers at Aptera Motors use robots to help assemble the automaker’s custom solar panels at its Carlsbad, Calif., headquarters.

Tough enough?

The first question that springs to mind when putting solar panels on a car: Can they survive a stray freeway pebble or parking-lot door ding?

Driving at highway speeds in a hailstorm means rock-hard objects can be colliding with your vehicle at more than 100 miles an hour, says Reed Thurber, Aptera’s head of solar engineering. His company has developed a tough glass skin for its solar panels.

The panels wrap around the hood, roof and long, tapering body of the tadpole-shaped, three-wheeled car, which means they have to absorb impacts from above and the side.

“We take our hail-impact testing to even higher velocities than is recommended in a lot of the standards and testing procedures,” says Thurber. The chemically treated glass is strong but flexible, akin to the Gorilla Glass on your smartphone, and the panels are mounted so that they can function even if the vehicle’s outer skin cracks, he adds.

Aptera is also planning to sell its panels to Telo Trucks, a San Carlos, Calif.-based maker of a 500-horsepower mini electric truck estimated to ship next year. Despite being shorter than a Mini Cooper, its bed is the same size as one in a Toyota Tacoma.

Polydrops, based in Glendale, Calif., uses Aptera’s panels on an all-electric camping trailer it’s already shipping to select customers.

Range serenity

Aptera’s “launch edition” vehicle will include panels that can absorb about 700 watts of solar energy at their peak. The ideal environment? Downtown Las Vegas, it turns out. All the glass buildings reflect sunlight onto every surface of the vehicle. In summer months, people living in a sunny environment could add up to 40 miles of range a day from panels alone. In northerly climates in winter, that drops to around 15 miles a day.

The big trade-off required to make a vehicle this efficient is in capacity: It seats two, and despite a fully enclosed cabin, it’s technically a motorcycle. Aptera’s front-wheel-drive version goes from 0 to 60 mph in 6 seconds, and has a top speed of 101 mph.

Aptera’s three-wheeled vehicle can absorb 700 watts of power from its onboard solar panels—enough to gain up to 40 miles of range a day.

Telo Trucks has received almost 12,000 preorders for its little trucks, which list for just over $41,000 each. In about one in four orders, the customer selects solar panels, says Jason Marks, Telo’s chief executive. These panels can be built into the vehicle’s roof and bed cover at a surcharge of $1,500 and $2,700, respectively. When in use, they can provide a supplemental 15 to 30 miles of range a day to the 350-mile range electric truck, he adds.

Telo’s vehicle isn’t the efficiency monster that Aptera’s is—it gets about the same number of miles per kilowatt-hour as a Tesla Model X—but it has a larger area for solar panels.

Aftermarket options

Another company is thinking about the EVs people already own: DartSolar wants to sell its solar boosters to add power to existing electric cars. The company’s CEO, Omid Sadeghpour, says the inspiration for his roof-rack mounted solar panels came when he bought his first EV and noticed it sat in the sun much of the day.

The cost of these panels, expected to start shipping by the end of this year, will range between about $1,000 for a small, 500-watt unit, and $4,000 for a 2,000-watt one that folds out horizontally and expands lengthwise when a vehicle is parked.

On a sunny day, the company’s midlevel, 1,000-watt system could add 10 to 20 miles of range to a parked Tesla Model 3, he adds.

Aftermarket panels have the advantage of low cost and repairability, Sadeghpour says—but his customers will also have to buy a bulky electric converter, which costs around $1,000, and stow it in the trunk.

Early days

These companies are still just ramping up to release products. But the math that underpins solar integration doesn’t lie. Today’s EVs are now efficient enough for integrated or roof-mounted panels to offset a meaningful portion of a typical driver’s daily mileage—especially in sunnier climes. In a compact EV, you could drive 10 or 15 miles a day without ever plugging in.

They’ve come a long way from the experimental solar-powered vehicles of the 1990s, which were little more than modified bicycles with shiny cowlings.

Student teams assemble around their experimental solar-powered EVs for the Solar 300 race at Phoenix International Raceway in 1991.

Today, the batteries, motors and solar panels necessary for efficient sun-powered cars are widespread and affordable, says Ronak Parikh, engineering director of the University of Michigan’s solar car team, which recently participated in a race across Australia. These technologies have become so accessible that the race even included a high school team from Texas, he adds.

But does that mean solar power will be coming to offerings from big automakers anytime soon? Marks of Telo Trucks is skeptical. For companies aiming to maximize their margins, the software and hardware challenges of solar-panel integration can eat into profits. It would only happen if there were sufficient demand, he adds.

So while your next vehicle might not be solar powered, one might soon buzz by you on the highway. And if the early adopters find this tech can deliver on the promise of charging-free mobility, demand for roof-mounted solar panels could, well, go through the roof.