Aptera Motors: The Solar-Powered Car That Could Change the Game

Imagine a car that never needs to be charged, powered by nothing but the sun's rays. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, meet Aptera Motors, a company that claims to have made this vision a reality. Their latest project is a solar-powered car that boasts an impressive range of 250 to 1000 miles, depending on the battery pack chosen.

The specifications of this car are pretty wild, with a drag coefficient of just 0.13, making it one of the most aerodynamic vehicles on the market. The company claims that its driving efficiency is about 100 watt hours per mile, which is significantly more efficient than even the most advanced electric cars like Tesla's Model 3, which averages around 250 watt hours per mile. This means that Aptera Motors' solar-powered car can travel a lot farther on a single charge.

But how does this car achieve such impressive efficiency? It all comes down to its unique design and technology. The car features three square meters of solar panels on the roof, generating up to 700 watts of power. These solar panels are designed to provide enough energy for the car to travel an additional 40 miles per day, making it virtually self-sustaining in terms of fuel.

The theory behind this concept is based on the idea that if you have a large surface area and can generate enough power from it, then you can potentially create a vehicle that doesn't need to be charged. This is where Aptera Motors' innovative approach comes into play. Their driving efficiency is significantly higher than other electric cars, allowing them to travel further on a single charge.

To put this concept into perspective, let's take a look at some numbers. If we assume an average daily sunlight of 63 watts per square meter (a reasonable estimate for most parts of the world), then three square meters of solar panels would generate around 4500 watt-hours of power per day. This is significantly more than the 4000 watt-hours needed to charge the battery.

If we assume a charging efficiency of 89% (which is a conservative estimate, as modern batteries have become incredibly efficient), then it's clear that this math actually checks out. In theory, Aptera Motors' solar-powered car could travel an additional 40 miles per day without needing to be charged, making it virtually self-sustaining.

Of course, there are some potential drawbacks to consider. For one, the car would need to be designed with safety in mind. A large surface area and a low weight-to-power ratio can make the vehicle more susceptible to damage, particularly if it were to collide with something heavier. Additionally, the solar panels on the roof may not be as effective in areas with limited sunlight.

Despite these concerns, Aptera Motors' concept has sparked significant interest among car enthusiasts and engineers alike. If their design is successful, it could revolutionize the way we think about transportation and our reliance on fossil fuels. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll see cars like this on the road, powered by nothing but the sun's rays.

The Aptera Motors concept may not be perfect, but it's certainly an intriguing idea. As technology continues to evolve and improve, who knows what other innovative solutions will emerge? One thing is for sure: with companies like Aptera Motors pushing the boundaries of what's possible, the future of transportation just got a whole lot brighter.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we are answering the question why don't we have solar-powered cars so we're going to look into you know is it possible to have solar-powered cars today and would it be possible to use solar power for cars in the future so we need to understand the sun and the sun has all of this energy and some of that energy actually makes its way to earth and so we've actually measured on the outside of our atmosphere how much power is hitting that surface and so the solar constant i use quotes because it's not actually constant but it stays close enough we get about 1.36 kilowatts about 1360 watts of power hitting one square meter so that's how much power we're getting from the sun and so if we look at the cross-sectional area of the earth uh we can take pi r squared get the area that that solar energy is hitting that solar power is hitting the earth and so we have pi r squared the radius of the earth being about 6 370 kilometers and so we can multiply our solar constant by our area of the earth so we can find out that at any given moment we have about 173 trillion kilowatts of power hitting the earth now the total energy consumption for the entire world all people combined for one entire year is about 190 trillion kilowatt hours and as you can see these numbers are fairly close but with different units so what this means is if you were to take all of the energy hitting the earth's surface from the sun for about one hour you just need a little bit more than one hour's worth of power hitting that surface uh to get to power the entire planet for a year so there's an abundance of potential there right there's so much energy that we could possibly get from the sun and enough to power the entire globe in a little bit over an hour so it's pretty wild the potential there so why don't we use this for a car right well let's look at a car as an example and so we're just going to take a vehicle like a tesla model 3 and say what if we covered the entire roof of a tesla model 3 with solar panels so looking down on a tesla model 3 it's about 4.7 meters long it's about 1.85 meters wide so we can multiply those together get the area and say well if we covered the entire roof there with solar panels that entire area above the car with solar panels we have 8.7 meters squared of solar power that we could we could generate from and so if we take that 8.7 meter surface area and we multiply it by our solar constant 1.36 well in a perfect world we could get about 12 kilowatts of power hitting that tesla about 16 horsepower now a question that i had is if you had 12 kilowatts of constant power how fast could you potentially drive indefinitely assuming the sun is shining on your car so you can do the math for that and figure out the actual speed with those 12 kilowatts of power how fast could you travel at a constant speed and never run out as long as the sun is shining and you can travel at about 100 kilometers per hour or about 62 miles per hour in an ideal world so this is actually kind of cool right like if everything is perfectly efficient you could travel you know close to a highway speed forever when the sun's out which is pretty neat and most people are usually driving when the sun's out so you know not a terrible thing there and of course if it can charge up that battery then you can drive at night as well so the question then is well how long would it take to fully charge that battery so let's say we have a 75 kilowatt hour battery we're able to charge at a rate of 12 kilowatts well in the perfect world we could charge that battery in just 6.25 hours using the surface area from the top covered in solar panels this all sounds great right but this is an idealized world and that is not realistic so there's some other things we have to take into consideration so the first thing we need to think about is not all of that solar energy is actually making its way to the earth's surface so about 22 percent is reflected by the earth's atmosphere and reflected by things like clouds about 23 is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere and then about 55 of that energy actually makes its way and hits the surface so we've only got 55 of that 1.36 to actually use and then solar panels actually have theoretical limits and efficiency as well we don't get all of that energy so the theoretical efficiency limit of a single junction meaning a single layer solar panel the common ones that you see on houses the theoretical limit for those is about 33 efficient if you were to have infinite layers with normal sunlight that theoretical efficiency goes to 68.7 and if you were able to concentrate that sunlight with infinite layers you'd get 86.8 percent so for the purposes of this video we're going to say we're going to have a single layer solar panel that we're going to be using on our car meaning we have a maximum efficiency possible of 33.7 percent so remember that means we're getting you know 55 of this is actually making its way to the surface and then of that only 33.7 percent max is what we're actually able to use now another problem we have is that the earth isn't flat despite what you may see in some places on the internet uh there actually is a curvature to the earth's surface and this is unfortunate for solar because if you think about a car that's here you know it's driving along at this point on the planet well then it's perpendicular to the sun's rays and of course it's getting lots of solar energy but if that car is driving up here and the solar panels are pointing up away from the sun well then it's not getting much energy right so you have to take into consideration the total area of the earth's surface and get an average of that so if you're just looking at a cross section of the earth that's pi r squared but if you're looking at the hemisphere that's actually having sunlight hit on it that's 2 pi r squared that's your area of that hemisphere that's you know visible for the sun that that sunlight is hitting and so you have to take that average so instead of 1360 watts per square meter you actually just have 680 watts on average per square meter and of course on the other side of the earth you don't have any sunlight right so if you're to take the total average of the earth's surface area and consider how much energy you have hitting it at any given moment well the average over 24 hours you know on that one spot on the surface is going to be about 340 watts so we have three things that we have to take into consideration so let's start with this first example here so our theoretical we've got 13 60 watts uh then we have to multiply that by how much is actually hitting your surface 55 then we have to multiply that by our limiting efficiency 33.7 percent and that gives us about 250 actual watts that we have to use uh so that's with our flat earth idea here if we use a real model of the earth well that's going to cut that in half so 125 and if we're talking about you know 24 hour average cycle then in any one spot you're getting an average of about 63 watts of power from the sun per square meter so let's go back to our tesla that's covered in solar panels and plug in some more realistic numbers so we've got our 8.7 meter squared on the surface of that tesla we're going to say that about 80 of that can be covered in solar panels of course you've got to have like glass and windows and things to look out of so you can't cover the entire surface let's say we can cover 80 of that surface let's say our charging efficiency for our battery is 85 and let's say we have ideal sunlight so we're sitting at this point on the earth's surface you know the perfect spot getting all that sunlight right in there so 250 watts uh what is our power that is you know coming on to the tesla going into that battery pack well it is just 1.5 kilowatts and if we're to take an average over a 24 hour cycle on any given point in the earth using this 63 watt number well then that means our actual average uh power here is 0.375 kilowatts that's the amount of energy uh that we're getting the power that we're getting from the sun uh so not very good right we were talking about 12 was like this magical number just based on its surface but realistically it's going to be somewhere in this range of 0.375 to 1.5 so what is our driving speed that we could theoretically drive at forever if we were getting this much uh power from the sun well unfortunately it is just about 19 kilometers per hour or about 12 miles per hour and that's using that best case 1.5 kilowatts of power hitting the car so not good and then if we look at charge time of course this is going to take more than one day so we have to use our average you know where we have to look at both sides the average total uh power being 63 watts so if we take our 75 kilowatt hour battery pack and we divide it by our charging rate which is .375 that gives us 200 hours or about 8.3 days so 8.3 days to fully charge the car now that might not sound terrible uh if you rarely drive and your car just sits out in the sun all day but if you actually use your vehicle on a regular basis it is it is not possible that you to get by knowing that it takes 200 hours to charge that thing back up uh when you know you can have you can go to a tesla supercharger and do that in 40 minutes so you know quite a problem now i was actually a bit surprised by these numbers this was actually a little bit better than i was expecting it to be i was expecting maybe it would take a month or so to charge your car and it's actually not that long so uh that was slightly better than i thought um but it also does tell me you know why it isn't really done because of course solar panels are expensive and how much value do you actually get out of it well it may not be that much in a vehicle that is this size and requires a significant amount of energy to move around however i found a car made by aptera motors not yet made today but they're planning on producing this vehicle and the specifications are pretty wild and they say that you'll never have to actually charge it depending on how much you drive because it will get all of its energy from the sun so the specifications of this car pretty impressive a range of about 250 to 1000 miles depending on the battery pack that you choose 0 to 60 in as low as 3.5 seconds over 100 mile per hour top speed drag coefficient of just 0.13 this is really the big driving factor of how they're able to make solar power work and then uh the heaviest version with the 1 000 mile range and a 100 kilowatt hour battery pack weighing about 2 200 pounds so sometimes with these cars i think the part of the thinking of why they won't be very popular is that they're small right and then safety becomes a concern you can have a very safe structure uh but if something that weighs ten thousand pounds hits something that weighs you know two thousand pounds uh then then you tend to lose that fight but that said like this is you know a little bit heavier than a lotus uh this is in like mazda miata weight territory so if that's something you're comfortable driving uh then this is potentially something uh you could be interested in you know from a safety standpoint i feel like it the safety isn't as questionable as i thought it might be once i saw it actually does have a decent weight to it so what's the theory behind this never charge well they say they have three square meters of solar panels on the car good for up to 700 watts and the real kicker of why this is possible is they say their driving efficiency is about 100 watt hours per mile now on a tesla that number on a model 3 is maybe 250 watt hours per mile so we're talking significantly more efficient uh you know two to three times more efficient as far as driving down the road versus a tesla because it has a small frontal area low drag coefficient now they say the solar panels on the car are good enough to give the car 40 miles of range each day so that you know if we're getting 40 miles of range each day and we know our efficiency is 100 watt hours per mile then that means our solar panels are charging giving the battery 4 000 watt hours of energy each day and so that's about 14 000 miles a little over 14 000 miles in a year that you could drive for free that the solar panels are going to take care of all of that energy so i wanted to do a little fact checking and see you know does this math actually work out and so going back to our 63 watt number here being the average of wherever you are on the planet on a given day how much energy you're going to get from that solar panel so if we have three meters squared of solar panels which is what they state multiply that by our 63 watts per meter squared and we've got our 24 hours in a day well that gives us about 4500 watt hours in a day which again so we need 4 000 at the battery this is saying 4 500 at the you know the solar panels so if you had an 89 charging efficiency for your battery the math actually checks out so i have no doubt you know in certain locations uh on the planet where you get lots of sunlight this actually probably does make sense which is pretty neat that it's actually you know feasible to have a car that you don't if you don't travel all that much you know 40 miles a day or so uh then you you have free energy and you just drive uh as much as you want without ever having to plug the car in to charge it up and then if you do need to charge it up well you just plug it in to charge it up so i think you know it's pretty interesting so either a car that has lots of surface area which is the challenge right because then it's going to be really big so it has to be long lots of surface area means you get enough power to do things but usually that means the vehicle is going to be too big and have you know high energy consumption so if you're able to get a really low energy consumption like this aptera motors we'll see you know if it actually comes out what it actually is capable of but if you're able to get that number down really low and have a decent surface area on the vehicle then perhaps it actually is theoretically possible to have solar-powered cars who knew i think that's pretty cool if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we are answering the question why don't we have solar-powered cars so we're going to look into you know is it possible to have solar-powered cars today and would it be possible to use solar power for cars in the future so we need to understand the sun and the sun has all of this energy and some of that energy actually makes its way to earth and so we've actually measured on the outside of our atmosphere how much power is hitting that surface and so the solar constant i use quotes because it's not actually constant but it stays close enough we get about 1.36 kilowatts about 1360 watts of power hitting one square meter so that's how much power we're getting from the sun and so if we look at the cross-sectional area of the earth uh we can take pi r squared get the area that that solar energy is hitting that solar power is hitting the earth and so we have pi r squared the radius of the earth being about 6 370 kilometers and so we can multiply our solar constant by our area of the earth so we can find out that at any given moment we have about 173 trillion kilowatts of power hitting the earth now the total energy consumption for the entire world all people combined for one entire year is about 190 trillion kilowatt hours and as you can see these numbers are fairly close but with different units so what this means is if you were to take all of the energy hitting the earth's surface from the sun for about one hour you just need a little bit more than one hour's worth of power hitting that surface uh to get to power the entire planet for a year so there's an abundance of potential there right there's so much energy that we could possibly get from the sun and enough to power the entire globe in a little bit over an hour so it's pretty wild the potential there so why don't we use this for a car right well let's look at a car as an example and so we're just going to take a vehicle like a tesla model 3 and say what if we covered the entire roof of a tesla model 3 with solar panels so looking down on a tesla model 3 it's about 4.7 meters long it's about 1.85 meters wide so we can multiply those together get the area and say well if we covered the entire roof there with solar panels that entire area above the car with solar panels we have 8.7 meters squared of solar power that we could we could generate from and so if we take that 8.7 meter surface area and we multiply it by our solar constant 1.36 well in a perfect world we could get about 12 kilowatts of power hitting that tesla about 16 horsepower now a question that i had is if you had 12 kilowatts of constant power how fast could you potentially drive indefinitely assuming the sun is shining on your car so you can do the math for that and figure out the actual speed with those 12 kilowatts of power how fast could you travel at a constant speed and never run out as long as the sun is shining and you can travel at about 100 kilometers per hour or about 62 miles per hour in an ideal world so this is actually kind of cool right like if everything is perfectly efficient you could travel you know close to a highway speed forever when the sun's out which is pretty neat and most people are usually driving when the sun's out so you know not a terrible thing there and of course if it can charge up that battery then you can drive at night as well so the question then is well how long would it take to fully charge that battery so let's say we have a 75 kilowatt hour battery we're able to charge at a rate of 12 kilowatts well in the perfect world we could charge that battery in just 6.25 hours using the surface area from the top covered in solar panels this all sounds great right but this is an idealized world and that is not realistic so there's some other things we have to take into consideration so the first thing we need to think about is not all of that solar energy is actually making its way to the earth's surface so about 22 percent is reflected by the earth's atmosphere and reflected by things like clouds about 23 is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere and then about 55 of that energy actually makes its way and hits the surface so we've only got 55 of that 1.36 to actually use and then solar panels actually have theoretical limits and efficiency as well we don't get all of that energy so the theoretical efficiency limit of a single junction meaning a single layer solar panel the common ones that you see on houses the theoretical limit for those is about 33 efficient if you were to have infinite layers with normal sunlight that theoretical efficiency goes to 68.7 and if you were able to concentrate that sunlight with infinite layers you'd get 86.8 percent so for the purposes of this video we're going to say we're going to have a single layer solar panel that we're going to be using on our car meaning we have a maximum efficiency possible of 33.7 percent so remember that means we're getting you know 55 of this is actually making its way to the surface and then of that only 33.7 percent max is what we're actually able to use now another problem we have is that the earth isn't flat despite what you may see in some places on the internet uh there actually is a curvature to the earth's surface and this is unfortunate for solar because if you think about a car that's here you know it's driving along at this point on the planet well then it's perpendicular to the sun's rays and of course it's getting lots of solar energy but if that car is driving up here and the solar panels are pointing up away from the sun well then it's not getting much energy right so you have to take into consideration the total area of the earth's surface and get an average of that so if you're just looking at a cross section of the earth that's pi r squared but if you're looking at the hemisphere that's actually having sunlight hit on it that's 2 pi r squared that's your area of that hemisphere that's you know visible for the sun that that sunlight is hitting and so you have to take that average so instead of 1360 watts per square meter you actually just have 680 watts on average per square meter and of course on the other side of the earth you don't have any sunlight right so if you're to take the total average of the earth's surface area and consider how much energy you have hitting it at any given moment well the average over 24 hours you know on that one spot on the surface is going to be about 340 watts so we have three things that we have to take into consideration so let's start with this first example here so our theoretical we've got 13 60 watts uh then we have to multiply that by how much is actually hitting your surface 55 then we have to multiply that by our limiting efficiency 33.7 percent and that gives us about 250 actual watts that we have to use uh so that's with our flat earth idea here if we use a real model of the earth well that's going to cut that in half so 125 and if we're talking about you know 24 hour average cycle then in any one spot you're getting an average of about 63 watts of power from the sun per square meter so let's go back to our tesla that's covered in solar panels and plug in some more realistic numbers so we've got our 8.7 meter squared on the surface of that tesla we're going to say that about 80 of that can be covered in solar panels of course you've got to have like glass and windows and things to look out of so you can't cover the entire surface let's say we can cover 80 of that surface let's say our charging efficiency for our battery is 85 and let's say we have ideal sunlight so we're sitting at this point on the earth's surface you know the perfect spot getting all that sunlight right in there so 250 watts uh what is our power that is you know coming on to the tesla going into that battery pack well it is just 1.5 kilowatts and if we're to take an average over a 24 hour cycle on any given point in the earth using this 63 watt number well then that means our actual average uh power here is 0.375 kilowatts that's the amount of energy uh that we're getting the power that we're getting from the sun uh so not very good right we were talking about 12 was like this magical number just based on its surface but realistically it's going to be somewhere in this range of 0.375 to 1.5 so what is our driving speed that we could theoretically drive at forever if we were getting this much uh power from the sun well unfortunately it is just about 19 kilometers per hour or about 12 miles per hour and that's using that best case 1.5 kilowatts of power hitting the car so not good and then if we look at charge time of course this is going to take more than one day so we have to use our average you know where we have to look at both sides the average total uh power being 63 watts so if we take our 75 kilowatt hour battery pack and we divide it by our charging rate which is .375 that gives us 200 hours or about 8.3 days so 8.3 days to fully charge the car now that might not sound terrible uh if you rarely drive and your car just sits out in the sun all day but if you actually use your vehicle on a regular basis it is it is not possible that you to get by knowing that it takes 200 hours to charge that thing back up uh when you know you can have you can go to a tesla supercharger and do that in 40 minutes so you know quite a problem now i was actually a bit surprised by these numbers this was actually a little bit better than i was expecting it to be i was expecting maybe it would take a month or so to charge your car and it's actually not that long so uh that was slightly better than i thought um but it also does tell me you know why it isn't really done because of course solar panels are expensive and how much value do you actually get out of it well it may not be that much in a vehicle that is this size and requires a significant amount of energy to move around however i found a car made by aptera motors not yet made today but they're planning on producing this vehicle and the specifications are pretty wild and they say that you'll never have to actually charge it depending on how much you drive because it will get all of its energy from the sun so the specifications of this car pretty impressive a range of about 250 to 1000 miles depending on the battery pack that you choose 0 to 60 in as low as 3.5 seconds over 100 mile per hour top speed drag coefficient of just 0.13 this is really the big driving factor of how they're able to make solar power work and then uh the heaviest version with the 1 000 mile range and a 100 kilowatt hour battery pack weighing about 2 200 pounds so sometimes with these cars i think the part of the thinking of why they won't be very popular is that they're small right and then safety becomes a concern you can have a very safe structure uh but if something that weighs ten thousand pounds hits something that weighs you know two thousand pounds uh then then you tend to lose that fight but that said like this is you know a little bit heavier than a lotus uh this is in like mazda miata weight territory so if that's something you're comfortable driving uh then this is potentially something uh you could be interested in you know from a safety standpoint i feel like it the safety isn't as questionable as i thought it might be once i saw it actually does have a decent weight to it so what's the theory behind this never charge well they say they have three square meters of solar panels on the car good for up to 700 watts and the real kicker of why this is possible is they say their driving efficiency is about 100 watt hours per mile now on a tesla that number on a model 3 is maybe 250 watt hours per mile so we're talking significantly more efficient uh you know two to three times more efficient as far as driving down the road versus a tesla because it has a small frontal area low drag coefficient now they say the solar panels on the car are good enough to give the car 40 miles of range each day so that you know if we're getting 40 miles of range each day and we know our efficiency is 100 watt hours per mile then that means our solar panels are charging giving the battery 4 000 watt hours of energy each day and so that's about 14 000 miles a little over 14 000 miles in a year that you could drive for free that the solar panels are going to take care of all of that energy so i wanted to do a little fact checking and see you know does this math actually work out and so going back to our 63 watt number here being the average of wherever you are on the planet on a given day how much energy you're going to get from that solar panel so if we have three meters squared of solar panels which is what they state multiply that by our 63 watts per meter squared and we've got our 24 hours in a day well that gives us about 4500 watt hours in a day which again so we need 4 000 at the battery this is saying 4 500 at the you know the solar panels so if you had an 89 charging efficiency for your battery the math actually checks out so i have no doubt you know in certain locations uh on the planet where you get lots of sunlight this actually probably does make sense which is pretty neat that it's actually you know feasible to have a car that you don't if you don't travel all that much you know 40 miles a day or so uh then you you have free energy and you just drive uh as much as you want without ever having to plug the car in to charge it up and then if you do need to charge it up well you just plug it in to charge it up so i think you know it's pretty interesting so either a car that has lots of surface area which is the challenge right because then it's going to be really big so it has to be long lots of surface area means you get enough power to do things but usually that means the vehicle is going to be too big and have you know high energy consumption so if you're able to get a really low energy consumption like this aptera motors we'll see you know if it actually comes out what it actually is capable of but if you're able to get that number down really low and have a decent surface area on the vehicle then perhaps it actually is theoretically possible to have solar-powered cars who knew i think that's pretty cool if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"