Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

At the CES conference some time ago, Lightyear, a new force in car building from the Netherlands, unveiled a prototype of the second product, which immediately attracted the attention of netizens because it was powered by solar energy.

In order to protect our only home, the global automobile industry has entered the stage of energy saving and emission reduction, and the new energy vehicle industry is developing rapidly. But we also know that whether it is electric vehicles or hydrogen-powered vehicles, the energy preparation process consumes a lot of electricity. Although we have nuclear power, wind power, photovoltaic, geothermal and other power generation schemes, the vast majority of electricity still comes from thermal power, which accounts for 71.31% of domestic thermal power (2021 data).

Touyuan: pixabay these energy sources still have some pollution, but they are more environmentally friendly than traditional fuel-fired cars. As a result, some car companies that seek to be more environmentally friendly and aim to solve the problem of car charging have decided to develop solar-powered cars.

It is speechless that just a month or so after CES, the new car-building power from the Netherlands went bankrupt.

01, the current situation of solar cars, funny car companies, solar energy is undoubtedly the cleanest energy we can use, only solar panels in the production process, will produce a small amount of waste water, waste gas pollution. In daily life, we have access to a lot of solar energy equipment, such as the common solar emergency lights, dozens of yuan each.

Many domestic enterprises are engaged in rural photovoltaic power generation, renting the roofs of rural residents' homes, placing solar panels, and the electricity generated will be sold to the State Grid. It can be said that solar power generation is very mature and common in China, but it is still very difficult to apply it to the automobile field.

Back in 2013, the predecessor of Lightyear released the solar-powered electric car Stella. After its establishment, the company released its first mass-produced prototype Lightyear 0 in 2019, priced at $263000 (1.78 million yuan).

Image source: the roof and hood of the pixabayLightyear 0 are equipped with about 5 "solar panels to charge the battery pack in the car. Ideally, the total charging power can reach 1.05kW, and the daily charge is enough to drive about 70 kilometers. Of course, the car can also be recharged with a charging pile, with a total battery capacity of 60kWh and a range of about 520km.

Because of the high price, Lightyear 0 received only 150 orders before it stopped production. It may be that the order is too small, and after two months of production, the company recently obtained court approval to suspend production of the Lightyear 0 model. After the release of Lightyear 2, the company planned to achieve mass production in 2025, only to declare bankruptcy just a month later.

The company is divided into three parts, of which Atlas Technologies HoldingB.V. Master intellectual property rights with Lightyear Layer B.V, Atlas Technologies B.V. Is in charge of product production, the closure of the most critical Atlas Technologies B.V. Part. Although Lightyear said the manufacturing plant went bankrupt to concentrate resources on the development of Lightyear 2, how could car production be separated from the manufacturing plant.

Lightyear's flag is to achieve mass production of the Lightyear 2 by 2025, and as we can see now, perhaps consumers should pin their hopes on other automakers. Yes, Lightyear is the only one that develops solar-powered cars.

Touyuan: pixabay as one of the giants of the global automotive industry, Toyota seems to have gone a little too far in the era of new energy vehicles. Others are studying electric vehicles, but Toyota has invested a lot of money in developing hydrogen-powered vehicles. In fact, Toyota has a wide range of research and development, including solar-powered cars. Toyota recently released a model called "bZ4X", which supports the installation of solar charging panels.

For as little as 20, 000 yuan, Toyota bZ4X can be installed with a solar charging dome, which officials say can drive 1750 kilometers a year to generate electricity.

According to Toyota bZ4X 100km energy consumption of about 12 kilowatt-hours of electricity calculation, about 210kWh of electricity can be saved, household appliances usually about 0.50 yuan per kilowatt-hour, charging stations about 1.50 yuan, even if calculated at a unit price of 1.5, it can only save 315 yuan a year, and it will take about 63 years to get back the cost. The average recharge can only drive less than 5 kilometers a day. I don't know who would install such a thing in a car.

Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Lutes and other car companies are also developing solar charging, but the results are not very satisfactory, can it be said that solar-powered cars in science fiction films can only exist in fantasy?

02. Can solar cars be realized? If you want to achieve pure solar cars, the most important thing must be the charging power. The energy radiated by the sun to the earth is called the "solar constant", which is about 1.353kW per square meter. Lightyear 0 can lay 5 kilowatt solar panels. Assuming there is no loss at all, it can be charged with 6.765 kilowatt-hours of electricity in an hour, or about 54 kilowatt-hours in eight hours a day, enough to drive 450km.

Image source: pixabay, however, this is only an absolute ideal value, the all-weather light intensity is the same, and there is no energy loss. According to the data of Lightyear 0, at present, solar panels can only be charged with 7 to 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, and this is still in a relatively ideal condition, if the weather is cloudy and rainy, it can hardly be recharged.

Even if human technology advances by leaps and bounds in a hundred years' time, it is impossible for solar charging panels to generate electricity absolutely lossless. Therefore, solar vehicles can not be the only power to drive cars in the future, but can only become emergency and supplementary means.

For example, if the car runs out of electricity in the wild, it can be recharged by solar energy, so that the car has enough energy to drive to the nearest charging station. More importantly, even if solar-powered cars are mass-produced, they will not be popular because solar-powered cars are too expensive.

Photo Source: the price of Lightyear 2 released by pixabayLightyear is much lower than that of the first generation, which can be purchased for as little as 40,000 euros (about 290000 yuan). The problem is that 81.4 per cent of Chinese car-owning households cost less than 200000 yuan, according to data released by China Census Yearbook-2020.

Even if the price of solar vehicles will decline in the future, considering the price of pure electric vehicles and the price of solar vehicles, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of yuan will be paid more for a solar power generation system, and it may even be due to the existence of solar power generation equipment. squeeze the space of the original battery, resulting in a decline in the overall range of the car, it seems that the loss outweighs the gain.

Generally speaking, solar power generation devices have commercial space in the enterprise field in the future, but they can not become the only energy source of cars, and can only become a supplement to the energy of cars. It is even said that the practical value of solar-powered cars is not high because of their high cost and limited power generation capacity in a short time.

The reason why mankind has been able to develop to today is that it dares to try everything possible, step over all the pits, the road ahead is naturally clear, and the pursuit of a future full of science fiction will never disappear.

03. What other energy sources may be used for cars in the future? in science fiction movies, speeding cars are the focus of depicting people's lives in the future, so what other energy sources are likely to be used by cars in the future?

1. Radio wave power supply in the most famous science fiction novel "three-body" in China, the energy used by cars in the future is also electric energy, but the energy source is no longer the battery in the car, but the radio wave transmitter in the distance. The principle of this kind of charging is the same as that of microwave bugs. At present, humans can already use microwaves to charge distant bugs, and in the future, they may be able to use the same principle to power cars beyond distance.

However, for radio wave power supply, Xiao Lei also has some worries. The car has a lot of power during driving. If the car is powered by radio waves, the radiation will not be so high that it will harm the human body.

2. Isotope battery isotope battery is the so-called nuclear battery or atomic energy battery, which is more common in satellites and space detectors. The principle of isotope battery is to use the radiation of radioactive elements to generate electricity, and the time it can be used depends on the half-life of the elements. In July 2022, the United States developed a C14-based isotope battery with a half-life of about 5700 years, the entire reflection process can last 28,000 years, and tens of thousands of years of use is not a problem.

Image source: pixabay isotope battery has been miniaturized, there is no problem to put it in the car, but the price is generally expensive. Second, the power of isotope batteries is very low, generally 100 watts, to achieve high power, unless the use of very short half-life, highly radioactive elements, but the half-life is too short means that the battery needs to be replaced frequently.

Perhaps with future technological advances, scientists can find solutions that are more efficient or can control the cost of batteries, so as to realize the commercial use of isotope batteries in the automotive field.

3. Hydrogen energy hydrogen energy is not advanced, and many hydrogen energy vehicles have been released now, especially Toyota and Hyundai, which have been deeply studied in the field of hydrogen energy vehicles. However, considering the cost, safety and other issues, the commercial value of hydrogen energy is not as good as that of batteries at this stage.

Hydrogen will produce water after combustion, and the pollution is mainly concentrated in the process of hydrogen preparation, and the energy density of hydrogen energy is higher than that of lithium batteries, which is very suitable for our future use scenarios. The problem that scientists need to solve is the cost of producing and transporting hydrogen, as well as the safety risks of hydrogen energy.

Compared with radio waves and isotope batteries, hydrogen energy is much more difficult, and photovoltaic power generation, wind power and other power generation devices are being laid in China. The advantages of these power plants are low pollution, while the disadvantages are unstable. Sometimes the power generation is very high, but under certain circumstances, they will not be able to continue to generate electricity. The electricity produced by the power plant cannot be stored and will be wasted, so the idle electricity can be used to produce hydrogen and reduce the waste of electricity.

Wanzhang tall building begins with building earth, and the future life must be based on the present. Even if solar-powered cars cannot become mainstream, we should not laugh at them. Every step of them is to explore the possibility of future existence. And under the trend of electric cars, it is difficult to get too much investment in such super-era projects.

Take Sono Motors, another Tianyangneng car research company, which raised only $126.6 million (860 million yuan) in the five years before it went public, not to mention the future of Faraday compared with giants like Wei Xiaoli. The sudden bankruptcy of this kind of company is normal, which can only prove that this exploration has failed, and some enterprises will continue to explore in this direction in the future.

After all, the world's first electric car was invented in 1881.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Feng Xingxing (ID:fengchuxing2021), author: lost Soul.

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