[Myi3reXhandy]

Originally Posted by FormerRotor

Not something we'll be selling (or something that is worth duplicating for most use cases); just figured the community may find it interesting.

I work for a commercial building energy efficiency company and we thought it would be good/fun (mostly to catch the eye for marketing's sake as the vehicle will be wrapped but also for utilitarian purposes) to have a solar generator in the vans from which we could charge tools, laptops, etc. In the case of our little i3, we decided to upsize the "generator", include a higher capacity inverter, add a ground-fault bypass via GFCI for the sake of seeing if it would successfully charge the car. Sure enough--it works (in the car's lowest Level 1 charge setting).

Currently the system includes...
- (4) 50w flexible monocrystalline panels
- (1) 3kwh "Generator" (for ease of removal) including 3kwh Lithium ion battery with built-in 120VAC, 12.5A (1500W, 3000W surge) inverter and MPPT solar charging optimizer
- (1) dedicated GFCI circuit for the sake of plugging the car into itself (mostly just for giggles) on which we'll likely add an extra plug in the cab for laptops, etc.

We didn't get into the electricals deep enough to see if you could interconnect to charge the car automatically (or while driving). Where there's a will there's a way, but if you wanted to charge the car off the existing solar set-up, you'd realistically only be getting around 850 to 1400 miles per year off the rooftop panels.

If you wanted to get fancy with it, you could install ultra-high-efficiency film over the entire roof surface (likely good for about 240w to 270w) and--possibly--hood and dig into the possibility of live-charging.

That's cool, imagine the frunk can be use as the spot to put all that, the part to charge while it drives would be but crazy due the software and regulations and systems, but over all it sound like something I will like to have