Mercedes Develops Solar Paint That Could Make Charging An EV As Simple As Leaving It Outdoors

The big problem with EVs is charging them away from home or if you don’t have a garage or dedicated charger. There have been cars like the Fisker Ocean that had solar panels on the roof, but they provided so little power that it would take days to charge the car. As a result, this was mostly just used to maintain the batteries while running the HVAC system in the car rather than charging it outright.

Well, Mercedes has created a paint that will turn ordinary body panes into solar panels. This will capture far more surface area and potentially create enough current to charge the batteries, making it a potentially viable solution to the problem many EV buyers currently have with public and private charging.

The Promise Of Solar Charging

We’ve seen the potential of solar powering a car on one other car, the Aptera. However, Aptera gets there not by innovating solar panels but by making one of the smallest and lightest EVs in the market, which makes existing solar panel technology adequate. However, most of us buy far larger cars, and it may take us a while to consider vehicles that are basically three-wheeled motorcycles with rain protection. 

If you can solar charge a full-sized vehicle like you could an Aptera, then for many of us who commute to work only to fight over the small number of Level-2 chargers that are in some work parking lots, we could just leave our cars out while we work and return to a car fully charged for free by the sun.

People often argue that those of us who have EVs should only charge with renewable energy; otherwise, we are fake. While I don’t agree with that conclusion, given the far higher efficiency of EVs, still being able to have an EV that can charge itself on solar would quiet those skeptics. A solar-powered full-size car would truly be extremely green.

Solar Charing Paint

The Mercedes paint is very effective, with an efficiency rating of 20%. This compares well to commercial solar panels, whose efficiency ranges from 18% to 24%, depending on the quality of the panel. The paint has a protective layer, like a clear coat, which passes through up to 94% of the sun’s energy, and the solar paint is about the width of a human hair.

Mercedes estimates that a driver could drive around 12,500 miles a year if they lived in a sunny climate like Los Angeles, California. This isn’t that much lower than the calculated average automobile mileage, which is 13,569 miles a year.

I expect. However, the issue will be how well this paint holds up and, typically, leaving a car outside all of the time tends to not only break down the paint (and mainly degrade the clear coat) but also cause the rubber to age prematurely, suggesting any car with this paint should be hardened to avoid the wear extensive sunlight can cause to the vehicle. So, it isn’t just the paint that’ll need to be addressed, but the tendency of cars left out in the sun to age prematurely.

Accidents could be questionable as well. Because this paint carries power, there could be unique safety issues when dealing with a crashed car, and repainting one of these vehicles without tearing it down could also be very dangerous.

Wrapping Up: Solar Paint Is Cool But

The concept of using paint to make an EV even greener is a good one, but there will be a lot of issues to address given there isn’t a single body shop that currently would know how to work with paint like this, how you deal with the paint in an accident, how well the protective layer over the paint will hold up over months of outdoor exposure, and teaching people how to best care for this new paint type.,

All of this is solvable, but it will need to be solved before the first consumer vehicle is shipped. Otherwise, those early buyers are likely not to like the result and will speak out frequently about their dislike. That’s a long way of saying the path to market for this product won’t be trivial, but if Mercedes can pull this off, it should significantly change EV satisfaction.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.