Patent published on March 31, 2017

This patent will make Siri smarter

In an era when the vehicles were high on oil, Electric Vehicles came for Earth’s rescue to save it from the clutches of fossil fuels.

Everyone knows how big hand Tesla has to bring this change. The company under Elon Musk, who needs no introduction, for a time being has been constantly decreasing the cost of electric cars while maintaining the efficiency.

Tesla, for example, has a plan to sell its Model 3 to a price of $35,000. Elon predicts that the annual demands could surpass 700k units.

It’s not only the price that is attracting consumers to their cars. There are other factors like the range of the car and other surprises which the company gives to its consumers. Recently, their car is believed to cover 670 miles on a single charge.

This range may increase as Tesla has plans to install solar panels on its cars.

Elon and Tesla have given the world a good start. It’s high time when other car manufacturers join in and play a role in making EVs mainstream so that future of their planet could be secured.

Another Interesting Read: This patent is solving one of the biggest infrastructure issues of EVs

And this has started happening. The information of patent I’m disclosing says so.  The patent application is filed by Toyota that reveals plans of the company to harvest maximum solar energy during a drive.

As per the patent, the navigation system of an EV of Toyota will create a route plan to reach a destination in such a way that maximum of the solar energy could get harvested.

It will use factors like the angle of solar panels w.r.t. the sunlight, area of a route covered by clouds and shades and shadows of trees into consideration while making a route plan.

To create a route plan, the help of data from the GPS, weather updates, sun inclination as per the time of the year, and satellite images will be used. The satellite images may help find an area of a route covered with shadows of trees or clouds, for example.

Thus, in the future, we may be using solar power to increase the range of our EVs. Also, it’s not the first time when Toyota came up with a plan to harvest energy in its vehicle. A few months ago, I found another patent application by the company where it was using small wind turbines in their cars for the same purpose.

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