Solar roof missing in action

Yeah, opening sunroof with solar panels sounds like utopia, lol. Though I have always been rather weary of 3rd party sunroofs; having someone cut into the sheet metal makes me uncomfortable, but I know someone who had one installed a long time ago (90’s?) and it looked good and didn’t leak, so I guess the guys that do that know what they are doing.

 

If you want to see Primes for sale with the solar roof, just go to the toyota site, search on inventory, select 500 miles, and sort by price from high-to-low. I had seen some for sale when I was shopping. $610 for 6-10 years of feeling smug about your public display of greenness seems like a pretty good deal, if you think it's about saving money by charging the car you're missing the point.

 

I wonder if you could just buy the parts needed as spares and install in a base model?

 

Its cheap? I dont think you can get one on a base trim. And while the options make it seem like buyers have a lot of choice it seems they have to take what they get anyway in most cases at the moment.

As I said you dont have this option in EU anyway, so you pay around 4k to 5k more for the top trim with solar panel. Toyota doesnt produce jsut for the US market...

 

No, people want want the other stuff but get the solar panel forced on them. There is not even a glass panel option for the top trim in europe - only the midlevel trim has it

 

This is a best case estimate that isn't likely.

"According to that screen, our best period of solar recharging during a roughly 9:00 am to 5:00 pm workday yielded 915 Watt-hours, or 4.0 miles....Let's calculate what the roof could do in ideal conditions, like if the sun shifted its orbit to shine perfectly on the Prius for 12 hours a day, every day, with no exceptions—guess you'll have to drive everywhere at night. With the roof working at its maximum 185 watt capacity, it could generate 2.2 kWh, or about 6.4 miles of range....Recalculating this with variables that better represent Los Angeles leads to very different outcomes. Generously assuming the roof can get six hours of sunshine, it could make 1.11 kWh, or 3.2 miles per day."
https://www.motortrend.com/features/the-2023-toyota-prius-primes-battery-could-take-three-weeks-to-recharge/

The $610 price takes into account that the customer has to pay for the higher trim. Same deal as the low hybrid premium on the Rav4. That takes into account the car having AWD. If the US got a FWD model hybrid, it would cost more than the $700 to $1200 difference with the AWD model.

I remember the gen4 PHV had to give up features to get the solar roof because of weight. The weight of the glass roof plus top trim features likely would push the car into a different weight category for testing, which would increase Toyota's costs, and maybe result in less favorable specifications..

 

For what it's worth, in Japan you've only got the one PHEV trim (Z), but you do get the roof choice:

132,000 yen for the panoramic roof (120,000+tax) = 875 USD
286,000 yen for the solar roof (260,000+tax) = 1900 USD

 

I included their kWh results and calculations to compare to avoid the question driving efficiency.

Cloudy days, parking spot imperfect for solar position, panels getting too hot, etc. are going to happen.

 

Yellow is definitely a matter of taste. Some of us associate it with exciting new things, but others associate yellow with things that have faded from white. I'm sure Toyota does the numbers on which colors are most acceptable to the end buyer, and some of them just don't rank.