Could an Electric car Re-charge it's battery, while in motion, using Solar Panels on the roof.?

could; you'd have to park in the sun..

and solar cells only pick up 13% max of the available energy

no, exxon allows this, its a free world. It's the science that doesn't allow it nor will you government.

If you not looked at science news, you should. There is a race held in different parts of the world where the rules only allow the use of solar panels for energy. People built extremely light weight frail cars that do exactly what you want. They can only carry 1 person weighing under 100 pounds. if the crash, the person inside has a high chance of dieing, especially if the crash occurs with a regular car.

If you can ever give everyone all those secret facts where exxon, a small oil company (17th largest in the world), has ever with held technology, you'd be famous, but in the mean time, saying cruel and unfounded things just makes you look really bad.

Yes, but Photovoltaic cells are notoriously inefficient. Some recent advances have pushed efficiencies into the 40% range but they are still experimental. Typical efficiency will range between 15 and 25% for modern cells, maybe slightly higher if you buy VERY expensive ones. However, the surface area required to generate any real amount of electricity is huge compared to a car. At best you could expect maybe a few hundred watts on an average car in direct sunlight covered with solar cells on the roof, hood, and trunk. Consider 1 horsepower is 746 watts. A midsize car may use 30-50 horsepower to maintain highway speeds, so you are talking around 22,000 to 37,000 watts to keep a car moving. Even if you could generate 400 watts from the panels, it would only amount to 1 to 1.8% of your cars energy requirements on the highway.

This is actually being looked at by Toyota for use on the next generation Prius, however it is being planned to use it to power the air conditioner, but will likely be an expensive option with the cost of solar cells.

Ah yes but at BEST in full sun all day you might get 2 miles out of the car.

The solar racers are really 3 or 4 wheel single person bicycle with no heat, no air, no radio, no real safety equipment. Not a practical car for everyday use.

Well it could, not only that several experimental solar panel only cars have been built, the problem is that the little solar cells are not sophisticated and advanced enough yet to produce enough energy to propel a family sized vehicle.

In a recent PBS documentary it was stated that Exxon spends less than a 10th of 0.1% of it's total profit in alternative fuel research, they did not only not deny it, they defended it.

My guess is that they probably have a hand in government via lobbyists and other means to curtail the development of cleaner and more fuel efficient cars. But they are not the only ones...

GM wants $10 billion from the government to "help" merge with Chrysler -who is about to go broke-, meanwhile GM adamantly refuses to build and/or import more fuel efficient cars in the US, while in Europe Vauxhall in the UK and Opel in Germany (both GM subsidiaries) have been building decent, safe cars with up to 65 mpg fuel efficiency, Ford too by the way.

Meanwhile small companies in the us that are developing some cars with up to and well over 100 mpg such as:

http://www.aptera.com/

http://www.teslamotors.com/

http://www.flytheroad.com/

http://evolution.loremo.com/content/view/13/47/lan...

http://www.zenncars.com/

are having a hell of a time getting the necessary support and financing from government agencies (in the US and abroad).

And how come Hyundai doesn't sell this car here?

http://www.hyundai.co.uk/newCars/i10/

And how about the Suzuki Swift which was once sold here, is still being sold abroad but Suzuki won't bring it here.

Yeah there's a conspiracy, small fuel efficient cars are being ignored and so is the development of alternative fuels while big, inefficient, bloated and corrupt corporations who make bad business decisions are thrown billions.

Sure. Check out the solar car races: Jump start for solar? Car race shows potential

Tapping the sun, students drove 2,500 miles from Texas to Canada.

i supose i have solar panles but it take some time to generate a lot of electricity. I had built a prototype solar car with one solar panel it was a very small car and i could easily catch up with it by walking so the car would either have to have very powerful solar panels or a lot of them!

well....it could,,,,,,but it would have to be wired correctly,,,and even then it would take a very long time as that battery is very big and the solar panels arent all that efficient...so the car would have to be turned off for quite a while to to do it

Nope.

The recharge rate would not be nearly enough to even

run the air conditioner.

Exxon has no say in this matter.

Yes because solar panels keep on gathering energy,.... unless it's in the night...