A week ago, AP cited an article in the Nikkei that wasn’t there. That article that didn’t exist was about an all solar car that didn’t exist. Under the headline “Toyota Secretly Developing Solar Powered Green Car” the AP “news” about the article and car that only existed in imagination was reprinted 164k times, as Google has it.
Not only had the original Nikkei article not been printed. TTAC’s B&B also opined that a solar powered car would be total bunk. “There is no way you are going to power anything like a conventional car on a normal duty cycle with only the PV modules on roof of the car,” wrote B&B RedStapler. He was not alone. WIRED wrote that “a chorus of online skeptics have begun dismissing reports that Toyota’s “top secret” solar concept would ever see the light of day.”
The story is getting stranger. Someone must have decided that if an article is reprinted 164k times, then it deserves the foundation it so sorely lacked. And so, today, the article that supposedly started it all miraculously and finally appeared in the Nikkei [sub]. It says: “The dream car, being tackled by engineers of Toyota’s Higashifuji Technical Center in the city of Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, is neither a gasoline-electric hybrid nor a fossil-fuel car. It would be an ultimate ‘eco-car,’ running solely on solar energy,” says the Nikkei a bit belatedly.
Well, in the beginning, it will be nothing else than a Prius parked in a house with solar panels on the roof: “Initially, the car would run on electricity generated by solar panels installed at homes as well as on the vehicle itself,” says the Nikkei. And “then, when further streamlined, the auto would run on car-mounted solar panels alone. Eventually, solar panels would altogether replace the internal combustion engine.” The paper doesn’t elaborate how this miracle will be performed, but they know that Toyota will do the magic without outside help: “Not willing to depend on other companies for key technology, Toyota intends to manufacture the solar panels on its own.” The rest of the article doesn’t provide further insights. It prattles on about a robot that does household chores for the elderly, and monosodium glutamate that is marketed by a Japanese company to Africa. Apparently, the all solar car is seen as just as important.
The article ends: “Yet, chaos is also the mother of things new that belong to the new generation. According to the Greek myth, while all the troubles were brought into the world from the opened Pandora’s Box, only Elpis, or hope, remained in the box.” Elpis definitely has left the box. Not only is there a solar car, there is also a time machine: An article in the AP quotes an article in the Nikkei that is so futuristic that it appears a whole week later.
Hey don’t be such a downer. Solar cars are completely feasible, just so long as you don’t mind driving laying down in a wing shaped vehicle that seats one and can only drive continuously on flat ground during perfectly cloudless days.
I like electric cars, and I like solar, but solar cars are just dumb.
If you could get two square meters of solar panels that converted sunlight to electricity at 100% efficiency (in the real world we’re around 20%), one hour of pure sunlight would get you about 2Kwh, which would go about ten miles.
This is avoiding the extra cost and maintenance of solar panels flying around town at 50mph.
If you want solar, put it on your house.
I just so happen to be the electrical director of my college’s solar car team, and I can say without a doubt that a solar powered car is NOT feasible in the real world.
Our solar array is roughly 9 square meters, cost $40,000, and generates the equivalent of about 2 hp with 20% efficient solar cells. Even if the cells were 100% efficient, you would still only get ~10 hp.
The thing is crazy fun to drive, though…
What a wild story. I thought it was already as crazy as it could get, but it just keeps coming. Then again, I do expect a solar car to hit the market well before a new golden age of print media.
Even at the limitations of current technology, there’s probably a role for solar at least in keeping the car cool while it’s parked. Excess electricity, if any, could be fed to the batteries.
A flat 15 ft**2 panel generates 200 watts at peak. In an hour, it’s the juice necessary to go a mile.
That’s not a lot but it’s also not so bad. If something conformable to the aerodynamic surface of the vehicle can be engineered, at reasonable cost and efficiency, it will probably make its way into the market.
It wouldn’t be the worst gimmick ever put onto/into a car.
It’s so naive–but very common–to assume the “number of hits” figure that Google issues (164,000 in this case) represents the number of times a specific subject has been mentioned. The Google algorithm will list hits not only for “Toyota solar car” but for solar cars in general, Toyotas in general, solar energy, and eventually even cars in general.
If you actually penetrate the “164,000” references, you’ll see that by about number 350 they’re down to linking to a reference to a “Toyota solar-powered keychain,” whatever that is.
It must amuse the hell out of the Google people, since everybody does it. I’ll bet if I Google my own name I’ll get thousands of hits. 20 of them will be me and 10,000 will be every Stephan and every Wilkinson reference on the Internet.
OK, I am not an Electrical Engineer, but…
…looking forward – with regenerative braking, solar charging, and other means to charge a (future) battery pack, it might just be feasible to have a “free/low cost to operate” car.
Of course I AM a conspiracy theorist so I am sure the companies that PRODUCE electricity and gas would never allow solar (or wind for that matter) power to gain any more than a token market share!
Stephan, there were quotes around the google phrase. That should only match articles containing the whole phrase.
Although when I actually go through the results I hit this:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 98 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
So there are maybe only 98 entries on the Internet, with 163,902 duplicates of it.
@stephan: If you place quotes around the search expression, as in “Toyota Secretly Developing Solar Powered Green Car” then you are supposed to get only hits for that sentence, which was the headline of the original AP story. If you follow the Google Link you should find only mentions of that exact sentence. You can do same with “Stephan Wilkinson”
Sorry, didn’t know that.
But when I do Google the phrase with quotes and go fairly deep into it, I find that hundreds of the links are for the very same Huffington post, dunno why. I still find it inconceivable that there were 164,000 reprints of the AP piece.
I find that hundreds of the links are for the very same Huffington post,
Probably because each individual comment can be linked to, and there is no strict definition of whether or not “www.example.com/foo” is the same as “www.example.com/foo?comment=2”.
So Google takes its best guess, and lets us override.
You’re absolutely right that there aren’t really 164,000 people who have posted this.