Can a car really run on sunshine from panels it carries itself? That is the question most of us argue about on this forum, and Rolling In Boost answered it by building an open-chassis solar electric car at home. It is a single-occupant machine whose panels together put out 1kW, and six months of work went into it.
The chassis is a welded aluminum space frame laid out as a lightweight truss. Before any metal was cut, the tubular frame went through finite element analysis stress simulations in SOLIDWORKS, and a yellow 3D-printed scale model of the frame was made first. Suspension came from an aftermarket ATV kit, covering the control arms, wheel hubs, brake rotor mounts and tie rods, with rack-and-pinion steering. The rear hub motor mounts went into square aluminum beams; the maker has said square tubes were chosen because they were on hand and a lot cheaper.
Several details stand out to me. Two flat panel arrays are built into the structure itself, one over the front and one over the rear, housed under a lightweight tubular lid fitted with a strut. The upper control arms were extended using steel tubing cut from a bicycle frame. A black racing seat sits in the cockpit below a raised roll structure. The motor bracket was created and then tested under torsional load by two people using extended leverage bars and a strap. Top speed is around 60km/h, and the car pulled a 3800lb car, with plenty of torque reported.
Not everything is settled, though. Cargo space is limited. Battery capacity, run time at speed and charging time have not been shared yet. A safety concern was also raised about a front panel strike sending the panel into the cockpit, and the maker has acknowledged it, planning a lower seat in a formula 1 style plus a new lower roll cage.
Project by Rolling In Boost. Watch it on their YouTube channel: