yabert
Solar Enthusiast
Hi
I have a electric Vanagon since almost 5 years now. Details in my signature.
It is awesome with lot of power and nice regen to save brakes downhill. It cost almost nothing to ride with electricity rate of hydropower here around 0.05-0.08$ US/kWh
We like it a lot and we use it as battery backup for our house in case of long outage.
But the fiberglass pop-top is in terrible shape and we want to build an hightop to replace it. Stand up in the van would be nice.
Of course I would like to shape the hightop to have a good aerodynamic in order to have the same range or even better. The actual pop-top have terrible aerodynamic.
I can design in 3D almost any simple shape and build it out of laser cut aluminum, but the thing is to know what is a good aerodynamic shape.
Below, some rapid shapes I designed + some old data about hightop for Vanagon.
I keep in mind that it could be easy to integrate a 400-500w panel in this hightop with a 2-3 kWh 12V storage battery, but it's not the main goal at this moment.
So, where to start?
Thanks
I have a electric Vanagon since almost 5 years now. Details in my signature.
It is awesome with lot of power and nice regen to save brakes downhill. It cost almost nothing to ride with electricity rate of hydropower here around 0.05-0.08$ US/kWh
We like it a lot and we use it as battery backup for our house in case of long outage.
But the fiberglass pop-top is in terrible shape and we want to build an hightop to replace it. Stand up in the van would be nice.
Of course I would like to shape the hightop to have a good aerodynamic in order to have the same range or even better. The actual pop-top have terrible aerodynamic.
I can design in 3D almost any simple shape and build it out of laser cut aluminum, but the thing is to know what is a good aerodynamic shape.
Below, some rapid shapes I designed + some old data about hightop for Vanagon.
I keep in mind that it could be easy to integrate a 400-500w panel in this hightop with a 2-3 kWh 12V storage battery, but it's not the main goal at this moment.
So, where to start?
Thanks