Well, there are if you have Aftershock enabled. Not sure about vanilla, guess no.
CDDA has been in development for a while. Maybe its reflection of the ācurrentā state of affairs needs to be updated a bit. A quick google and some highly unreliable calculations estimations suggest that around 10% of gas stations in New England probably have a charging station for electric vehicles. People living there (especially anyone who actually owns an EV) will have a better idea of the truth.
Electric vehicles arenāt supposed to be charged at ācharging stationsā normally. You are supposed to plug them into a normal wall socket and charge overnight. The charging stations are only for fast charging during long trips.
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can confirm. using the fast charging ports will eventually damage the batteries through wear and tear, where the regular charging doesnt.
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Over here in the UK car parks often have charging points where you can charge up for however long you are parked. Plus similar schemes for parking on the street. I presume they use slow or at least not fast charging.
CDDA EVs also have unusually low battery capacity for a 150kW motor and being shaped like a sedan, with 400L worth of trunk, 2*40 MJ is only 22 kWh.
(current solar panels in cata are 40 kilojoulesā¦ say per turn
Current CDDA solar panels are 50 W, that is to say, 0.050 kJ / s. Please donāt spread incorrect nonsense.
A 50 W/m^2 is about 5% efficient, which is pretty reasonable for a general purpose solar panel. Upgraded solar panels are 100 W/m^2 and 10% efficient, which is excellent. Quantum solar panels are 300 W/m^2, which is 30%, and that is a higher efficiency than any existing solar panel and isnāt even believed to be theoretically possible under our current understanding.
So yes, CDDA has some unreasonable good solar panels, but theyāre a special case. Most solar panels are good but not great, and some are better.
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the radiated crash damage can be mitigated by installing shock absorbers on every vehicle tile,
Even in my tests, a shock absorber only prevented the damage to a solar panel for a 20 mph collision. At 40 mph, the protected solar panel was still destroyed. The radiated shock damage mitigation from shock absorbers is nice, but itās also pretty limited.
47% efficiency is possible nowadays, under laboratory conditions and with $$$.
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+186W with stereo on while raining at 17h20. So +236W at panels.
I noticed that stereo does +30 joy, while mp3 player only +20.
So noted, and thank you for that research! I donāt feel any need to up the power output of quantum solar panels, but itās good to know that theyāre now in the range of āpractically possible if you had more money than senseā instead of āyou canāt do this you knowā.
Iām reasonably happy with the vehicle physics side right now: vehicles moving at a steady cruise speed are slowed down each second by air drag and rolling resistance, and then spend motive energy to accelerate back to their cruise speed. The biggest issue right now is that engines produce a constant amount of power and use infinite perfect gears to divide that power into torque and RPM, while in real life gears are limited and imperfect and engine torque is (relatively) constant and overall output power increases as engine RPM increases. Fixing that would be really complicated; to a first pass, it wouldnāt be crazy to reduce the output power of engines/motors used for motive power to 70% of the current values and reducing efficiency likewise. But I donāt think Paul_Blayās complaints are going to be addressed by reducing solar vehicle range to 70% of its current values.
Iām less concerned about range than I am about damage. Solar panels canāt be repaired without spare parts taken from solar panels, which means that youāre eventually going to run out (the world is fairly large, but youāre going to deplete the supply within an ever increasing radius). When that damage comes from an occasional hit to the roof itās not a big deal, but if youāre going to wear them away every time youāre going somewhere new it is.
This may mean a complete conversion to swappable storage batteries, but they canāt be repaired without cannibalization either.
Itās not so much a complaint as an observation. I donāt know why real solar electric cars canāt do the stuff that ones in CDDA seem to (although I was under some level of misinformation).
Just now I was in my RV with the fridge on and basically just boiling water to refill a 60L tank bit by bit. The battery level actually went steadily up with four standard solar panels in the sunlight on a clear spring day. Is that realistic? I honestly donāt know.
No, thatās not realistic. The issue is that although the game has definitions for what 1 battery charge is, no one has gone back and rationalized all the welding and cooking costs. For instance, the energy it takes to fully boil 1 unit (0.25L or 250 g) of water should be:
250 g * ( 80 C * 1 cal / C-g + 540 cal / g ) * 4.184 J / cal * 1 battery / 1000 J or 649 battery charges.
In game, itās currently like 2 charges.
4 solar panels produce produce 720 battery charges per hour, so if you were boiling than tank at 0.25L per hour, the panels should recharge the battery. If you were doing it a little more quickly, the battery would drain like crazy.
Thatās not a flaw in the vehicle model, thatās a problem with the crafting recipes. =/
i said I was guesstimating! i knew almost- how much a single solar panel gives but not exactly.
nowhere that i know of (i didnāt check the files) does it say how much a solar panel actually givesā¦ mabye that should be added to the wiki or item browser?
i will admit that i am not an electrician nor do i know that much about power and the distribution of such (other than basics.)
Like with all vehicle tiles that use or produce power, it says so when you try to install it:
As for solar efficiency, I was going to state that there are really good ones out there already and just recenty there was a new record set for perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, but it looks like Iām late to that partyā¦
To my knowledge; yes. At least it did in older versions, where I had problems to drive for long distances during the winter as it was overcast more often.
Well, given that Bertrand Piccard even flew around the world (although not in one go), I guess it would be possible, although really expensive and not really worth the effort (as you could usually recharge your battery relatively easy).
Some more research laterā¦ thereās the Lightyear One, a real solar car which has 5 mĀ² of solar cells all around its body and itās expected to charge the battery to offer an additional 50 km per day (with a range of 725 km, not sure if the 50 km are included in that or not).
While Iām not able to find the exact capacity of the batteries or power output of the solar panels, the homepage of the car states it uses 83 Wh/km and 1 hour of solar charging adds 12 km. So, thatās close to 1 kWh per hour, or 1 kW output (which would mean the solar panels/cells have an efficiency of 20%).
Now to answer your base question: Why does it look like to be so much more efficient in the game than in real life, even if - based on the numbers - it clearly isnāt? The answer: You donāt drive that many kilometers (and not as fast) in the game compared to real life.
For a ācity carā that you use for short trips to your local store and home, it would clearly add enough charge every day to keep it going endlessly. But it wouldnāt make much sense to use solar cells on it, as you can just plug it in when you get back home. The efficency for perfectly mounted solar cells is much higher than on a car roof, so youāre better off by installing these cells on your homeās roof and charge a battery that charges up your car when you get home (and you can use the stored/leftover energy for other stuff too).
oh~ so it does show it thereā¦
ā¦ how did i never notice that?
Well, maybe you need some glasses 
?
Just kidding. Given that Iāve read the āreclining seatā as ārecycling seatā for years and never understood why I would want to install a recycled seat (which takes a normal seat) with less storage and durability into a car - even though thereās clearly a description about itā¦ wellā¦ stuff happensā¦
Woof. And there are a whole ton of those. It would probably be easier if it was a flaw in the vehicle model.
Ah yes, I was about to complain that my headlamp uses more power than a hotplateā¦
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