There are plenty of interesting hypothetical situations what will (most likely) never come true. What if people could flap their arms and fly? What if cats were just dogs in very elaborate costumes and evil plans? What if a superhero movie didn’t end with a big fight scene between good and evil? What if a sleep-bus or cabin was made entirely out of cheese so you always had the perfect midnight snack whenever you wanted it? But cars running on solar panels really isn’t a crazy hypothetical idea at all. If you’re interested in such wild ideas such as ‘saving the planet’ and ‘reducing our dependence on oil’, see how it would all work.

Power Conversion

A solar panel takes energy from the sun and then converts that energy into electricity. The electricity goes straight to your battery to charge it up, so the motor can run, or it’s fed straight into the motor, so it can be powered directly. That way if you happen to get a speeding ticket while you’re out on the road, at least you can take comfort in the fact that you didn’t have to pay for the gas that led to your police encounter. (If you’re searching ‘traffic school near me‘ to have the ticket dismissed, by the way, consider taking an online traffic school class so you don’t have to deal with the hassle of all those points.)

How It Would Really Work

If cars ran entirely on solar panels, we’d probably see a similar reaction in the public as what we saw when the Prius first came out. No matter how affordable the technology happened to be (or didn’t happen to be), we’d see certain celebrities buying it immediately to get the word out. Then, we’d start seeing more and more ‘regular’ people coming around to solar paneled cars. At first, they might be smug about their choice. Owners might act as though they are the sole reason the Earth isn’t going to burst into flames tomorrow. They may go around casually talking about their car to total strangers. They may take the bus when they don’t have to, so they’ll have an even bigger audience to entertain and inspire. It might give people the wrong idea about green technology until…

The Aftermath

While it may seem like only rich or ostentatious people only want to buy solar-panel cars at first, eventually there will be a crossover. Just like hybrids and electric cars, the price will start to go down, the ubiquity will start to go up, and then suddenly, it’s not that novel to see someone driving around with a car that runs entirely on the power of the biggest star in our solar system. You may be surprised to learn that solar panel cars aren’t just a distant dream but a reality right at this very moment.

The reason why you probably don’t know very much about the technology and the development process is that solar panel cars are still in the preliminary stages in many ways. The technology for solar power for cars is limited right now and extremely expensive. It’s difficult to achieve the consistency in speed a driver would need to successfully make it from Point A to Point B.

The practicality may not be there to make solar powered cars a global phenomenon just yet. But just like everything in the developing stages, the technology is only likely to get better. The more and more smart people are on the case, the more likely it is we’ll answer this important question.