General Discussions

[LP]

You do realise that the solar challenge route is from Darwin to Adelaide and there are plenty of steep grades on the route. 

Sure we get that, but it's nothing as a percentage of the total route, gradients on the Solar Challenge are like a chicane on a F1 track.

For reference, we were talking about the use of portable SolarPV to recharge / power a commercial EV, and I was commenting in context of [member=20]kruddler[/member] discussing Off-road / Off-grid applications.

The Solar Challenger Cruiser class is basically an open class being recharged at various grid or fuel power recharging centres, although they are great pieces of technology demonstration they are not that relevant to a discussion about EV with portable SolarPV recharging. The Cruiser class has been dominated by universities sponsored by big industry or big R&D entities some vehicles are worth million$, the GaAS SolarPVs used in that challenge are so expensive they are normally only used in space. Even in this open class, the cars are a fraction the weight of commercial EVs, about 25%.

btw. Those bespoke GaAS panels, that make 800W/sqm, they aren't 10x or even 50x the cost, they can be 500x the cost of silicon. The reason why silicon is dominant despite on average being about 50% less efficient than GaAS. GaAS is also used in semiconductors, the unit cost of GaAS devices even at the mass scale of transitors (FETS, etc..) is about 10x the cost of silicon.