But this charging point is too small to be effective for charging vehicles. To put it in perspective, with a gasoline car you can fill up your tank with 40-liters of gasoline in about 2 minutes. The rate that energy is flowing into the car is 11.55 MegaWatts. With 40-liters of gasoline you have put 1,386,400 kJ of energy onboard.

To store the same amount of energy in a battery at a rate of 1.76-kW would take 218 hours or roughly 9 days.

But all is not lost. Electric motors are very efficient, and electric cars like the one shown are light and don’t go at high speed. These cars would not need to store the same energy as 40-liters of gasoline, and the charging time would be less. But it would still take a long time to charge with this device. It simply needs more solar panel area.

If people know these things are out there, they might reconsider where they can go and not be so afraid to drive a bit father from home in their EVs. They know they can get the extra charge to make it back even if they had enough to begin with.

I tried a while back to get some statistics on EV draining cycles from Slashdot. No one responded. So the situation we have is people just don’t know how an EV is going to behave in that last 10% or 5% of it’s charge. I’d love to see some stats on what the cars do to warn the driver, how soon they warn, if the distance the car predicts actually is attainable, etc.