(Credit: Courtesy of IISD / Earth Negotiations Bulletin)
When the big automakers talk about solar powered cars they have a lot of nasty things to say: “They’re not cost-effective”, “They don’t really work”, “They’re ugly”.
The rest of their arguments were utterly demolished this month by the “Solar Taxi”, an utterly-unfueled auto which completed a trip around the world on December 4th, arriving at a U.N. conference on controlling climate change with zero emissions and absolutely impeccable timing. The car completed the fifty thousand kilometer trip powered entirely by a trailer of solar cells, carrying over a thousand people at one point or another along the way.
So why haven’t you heard more about this amazing mechanism? Think about it: if Ford came out with a car that could go round the globe on a single tank, it’d be hailed with ten Nobel prizes and the cure to cancer rolled in. But it seems that when you go even less, to zero tanks, it’s suddenly in the “odd and interesting” section on page 37b.
The solar taxi made the trip with a trailer of six meters squared, covered in solar panels (though for trips less than three hundred kilometers, you don’t need any panels at all – the cars cells store more than enough charge for your daily commute). The average gas-guzzler would need to tow over three tons of gas to make the same trip.
If you want to know how much the solar taxi guy paid, step outside and see how much the sunshine charges you.
