Various authors on here (including myself) have been ridiculed for suggesting this concept over the years. Good to see Ford are taking it seriously!

Depending on the cost, this could work for me. I have a garage, so topping off at night would be easy enough. But I live in sunny Colorado, and park all day at work, in the sun. This approach could reduce the need for an oversized battery.

Interesting concept, but seems a little bit on the flashy side. Why not just have PV on the roof and be done with it?

And the simulation shows the car moving under the canopy as the sun is passing overhead - how is that accomplished?

8 times as much solar is going to more rapidly wear out the solar panels. This has been discovered in many other PV concentrator trials.

Finally, 8 times as much solar insolation hitting the roof would increase the heat load on the car by 8, which could be a summer disaster in most states.

In the days that PV cells were expensive, solar tracking makes sense, to reduce the amount of PV cells used. Now, PV cells are real cheap, so the tracking mech. actually costs more than using extra solar cells to provide equivalent output.

IMHO, mount solar PV on the building or on top of parking lot cover and then use the electricity to charge the vehicle would be more practical than solar focusing and tracking mechanism. In this way, even PEV's parked in parking garage on lower decks can benefit from solar PV's mount on top of the building.

The discussion on the power/energy of the system needs to be clarified. The power is hinted at being 8 kW, but surely that isn't correct because the Energi's battery is only 7.6 kWh, so that would mean a full charge in an hour--but the sentence also says it would take a full day to equal a four-hour battery charge. It can't be both! I would suspect something around 1 kW to get a full charge in 8 hours of sunlight.

@Will S, having solar panels on the roof doesn't increase the heat load on the car--the same amount of sunshine is hitting it. The PV will mean that more is absorbed than reflected from a conventional roof, but it certainly won't be anything like eight times higher.

I suspect it would be cheaper for someone who owns property in the sunbelt to put up a car port w/solar panels on top rather than carry the extra weight of the panels around or putting the concentrators on top of the car port. This would only help while at home during the day, which isn't useful unless this is driven by a work at home person. On the other hand, panels on the car allows slow charging anywhere if that is at all useful.
This concept would make more sense for an at-work parking lot, but again, put the cells on the car port.

The area of the roof doesn't change. Only "one sun" is hitting the roof. A lens would only concentrate that energy on a small portion of the area, it wouldn't increase the total amount of energy/heat.

If high efficiency cells were used, say 40% efficient, then 40% of the energy would be converted to electricity and the car would be cooler than a highly absorbent black roof.

That said, I think this more of an attention-getter for Ford rather than a practical solution.

It's still possible to provide a reasonable number of daily "sunshine" miles without a concentrator car-port.

If you allowed a solar panel to extend from the roof over the windscreen and bonnet when parked, you could easily get 3.5 metres squared of panel over the car. (Of course it would retract before driving off!) The most efficient non-concentrating solar cells are ~38% efficient, which would give 1.33 kW peak from this area.

In an overcast location (eg the UK), that would give you an average of 2.9 kWh per day, which is equivalent to 14.6 electric-only miles per day or 5,300 miles per year.

However, in a sunny location (eg Arizona), you would get about 2.5x that, or 36 miles per day (~13,000 miles per year).

Of course you would get much more free sunshine miles in the summer than the winter, but it would still cut your annual fuel bill massively, and of course no need to plug in. Any surplus could be fed into the house or sold to the grid if the car is not being used.

Excellent practical ideal from 'clett'.

Another future possibility will be to integrate transparent flexible high efficiency solar panel over front-back windows, bonnet, roof and booth for 4M2 to 5M2. If not enough, the roof could open 'left and right, when parked, to double roof effective size and overall size of 6M2 to 7M2.

In sunny areas, that would be enough to power well designed BEVs, without having to plug them in, for up to 15,000 miles/year. Summertime surplus could be fed in the local grid or home storage system.

Good point, E-P. Matching demand to supply is important.
If the concentrator is capable of charging only one PHEV, then what happens if that person's commute is only 10 miles one way, thus draining only 1/2 of the usable charge of the PHEV? The rest of the day, the solar energy will be wasted. However, on cloudy days, the car may not receive sufficient charge.

However, if the solarized carport can charge many cars, as well as supplying excess power to the grid, then no solar electricity will be wasted. On cloudy days, the PV panels on the carport won't have enough power for all the plugged-in cars, and the cars will have to be charged from the grid's power.

Another disadvantage of this scheme is that the car must be able to move back and forth to keep the sunlight focused, thus taking two parking slots for one PHEV. This may not be acceptable in a busy parking lot, or will cost the owner double for parking fee.

I missed the canopy part in an earlier comment. The larger "gathering" area of the canopy would put more energy onto the top of the car.

If the cells don't convert that extra energy into electricity then the vehicle would likely get hotter than an ordinary vehicle.

Thanks, E-P, for noticing the Emperor's New Clothes.

Since the law mandated handicap parking slots everywhere, the law can also mandate charging sockets in limited number to be available at every business and parking lot. This will help owners of PHEV-20 who has over 20-mile daily commute to avoid having to burn gasoline. Day-time charging will help absorb the daytime solar peak energy production and will allow higher penetration of solar PV.

It would be more useful that PHEV makers like Ford and GM would lobby for mandating charging sockets at work rather than expending effort at this concentrated lense scheme.