A Youtuber decided to see if it was possible to charge his Tesla Model 3 with solar panels. Its objective is to make this charger mobile by creating a trailer covered with 8 panels that it will be possible to tow in order to charge the batteries while driving.
Suffice to say right away, the Youtuber ItsYeBoi is neither a specialist in electric cars nor a professional electrician, although he owns a Tesla Model 3. But never mind, most of the videos are tests of Chinese products and challenges of all kinds, he decided to try this unique experiment.
8 solar panels of 100 W to charge a car?
A few months ago, he had already tried to charge his Model 3 by connecting it to a small wind turbine. The experiment ended in failure, the Tesla detecting a grounding problem refusing to charge. In any event, even if the system had worked, the power generated by the wind turbine and the capacity of the battery used were too low to have any use in everyday life.
Rather than giving up, ItsYeBoi therefore turned to solar panels. He bought 8 of them on Wish, a site which is not known for the quality of products in order to place them on a trailer. The idea being to charge a first battery, itself connected to a converter on which the Tesla charger will be connected. The 8 solar panels are given for 100 watts each, thus offering a maximum power of 800 W in total.
Fun experience, but useless experiment
As a reminder, a Supercharger version 3 is capable of supplying 250 kW to the Tesla, or 312 times more than these 8 solar panels, even before considering the losses linked to successive electrical conversions and the loss of performance due to the weather or the angle of the sun. In order to see if the solution was functional, he created a trailer on which the panels were mounted. They are connected to 2 charge controllers, themselves connected to 3 lead-acid batteries.
At best, 600 watts is generated. It’s enough to charge a smartphone and even make a coffee. However, anyone with a sense of electricity will find it difficult to watch this video because of phrases like “The panels generate 800 watts per minute”. According to his calculations, it would take 10 days to fully charge his Model 3. His new goal is to put solar panels on his Tesla, like the Lightyear One presented 6 months ago, or the Cybertruck and its optional solar panels.
800 watts? What are these stone age modules? You need only 6 x 6 feet reasonably modern modules…
NIO has battery swap stations for their cars. just go to a gas station pull out your spent battery, trade it for a charged one and your back on the road. keep a spare in the car if you run out of juice before you can swap it. Solar could charge that one, Tesla should have easy battery swaps would help a lot who wants to wait 120 minutes every 200 miles to recharge.