I want to look at buying an EV, I live in a city, but I live in a rental flat and there’s no charge point.
Electric is the future. I would love to drive about in a Tesla but only have a budget for a Leaf 
Hopefully electric is the way to go, not like when the government told everyone to buy diesel cars
Whether the electric revolution is right or wrong its now very much the government’s agenda so it is the future whether we like it or not. My current desiel car runs just fine. The tax is £30 per year which is much cheaper than when I had my convertible sports car which was £500 per year and cost me £100 per week in petrol.
I can see the government implementing higher and higher emissions tax to force people to make the change.
The video says it will charge enough on average for 10 miles a day of driving. Average UK commute is 10 miles, so 20 miles per day, plus let’s say 10 miles for doing shopping and other activities.
It’s a bit of a way off for most people, but if the charging rate combined with efficiency doubles, then it could start to look viable for a large amount of people.
To be honest it makes more sense to have the solar panels on your garage roof or somewhere and charge the car from that. Might be OK for people without a garage, but even with 100% efficient solar panels the solar radiation hitting a car is pretty small. You’d still need to plug it in if you are going more than a few miles a day
I don’t think you can double the charging rate of a solar panel, unless they are rubbish panels to start with. There is a hard upper limit on solar panels due to the amount of solar radiation per metre squared that actually hits the panel
edit: I overestimated the efficiency of current panels. It should be possible to double it with better technology. a good current panel is only about 20% efficient
Just thinking about this a bit further, there are different ways to improve the efficiency of a vehicle. There are three main forces that require power to overcome: air resistance, friction with the road and force needed to accelerate.
In theory you could have a way more aerodynamic vehicle, an actuated spoiler or something that optimised grip Vs efficiency, computer controlled acceleration so that it is done most efficiently.
I could see solar powered vehicles with no wall charging being possible, inside the limits of the amount of energy we get from the sun.
Lots of interesting stuff in there but 7.5 miles of range from an hour’s solar charging in ideal conditions is slightly underwhelming if the hope is for solar being viable without a top-up - certainly I doubt they’d ever be viable in the winter. Though the maximum range is more like it… ignoring the price tag of course.
I’d say that charging is pretty good! The above car only charged 10 miles per day, whereas this car looks like it’ll be more like 50 miles per day!
That would mean I’d never need to plug into the mains, for me.
Well, that’s 50 miles on a perfect day. On an average British day outside of the 3-4 extremely good weeks we can generally rely on each summer though, I’m unsure how it would translate?
Not knocking the technology, it’s still a good thing and part of the mix, I just wouldn’t personally get my hopes up about a solar-only car (unless as discussed above we’re talking panels all over a house roof with that specific aim in mind).
Rivian going public:
Mostly making trucks, big contract with Amazon.
To quote Elon -
“Don’t optimise some thing that shouldn’t exist”
This is an interesting case of what can be done but without some major major changes to PV generation it’s not a workable option in my opinion.