Yup. A 200 mA panel is pretty useless for a car.

Keep in mind, your alternator is probably rated for roughly 55A max output. And it likely runs at around 5-10A in normal driving (light-moderate electrical load).

Meaning, you'd need 5-10 of my 1x3 ft. 1A panels, aimed perfectly at the sun, to provide as much power as the car is taking from the battery while driving. :eek:

You can leave a solar panel connected while you drive.

Deep cycle batteries are a little bit more expensive than starting batteries.

Harbor Freight sells them!

The readings were for my 94 Civic EX. It takes a lot of power to run the thing: 90 watts minimal just idling. All the stuff on, like in the winter, takes more than 700 watts. There's no way a portable panel could keep up with idling, it would be a good load even for a battery charger.

However a full size battery would be enough for maybe an hour, though a starter battery will fall apart after a few times doing this, especially if you try and trickle-charge it. A big deep-cycle battery and a good charger is a better bet.

I am alwas impressed with the markup they put on solor battery maintaners, if you wanted to buy solor panals like you might put on your house, you could exspect to pay around $4-5 a watt if you are buying a number of panels, $24.95 for a quarter watt panal is... $99.80 per watt or 19 times what the panal could cost.
Randy said that he figured 90 watts just to idle the car, correct? and you want to produce more then you use, so round it up to a nice round number like 100 watts to run the car, and charge the battery a little bit from it being cloudy yesterday, of course you don't want to over charge your battery, so you want a charge controler too, and then all the wire, and mounting, and I'm guessing it is going to cost around $500-600 to remove your alternator and replace it with solar, of course the solar panals are going to outlast the rest of your car, so it's a pretty solid investment, but you are most likely going to want to also invest in things like a small alternator that you can kick in at night, and cloudy days, and LED lights all around.

I think the real solution here is find a way to create the turbo-charger alternators.

I've never played with a turbo before, but how much work would it be to gut the internals and hook up an alternator to spin powered by the exhaust gas?

You guys know the device I'm talking about. Maybe it's time to get creative and make our own.

BMW is way ahead of you. They already have a prototype and they said they will start putting it in production cars in 2012

I wouldn't call 2012 way ahead of me. This is why I said we should make our own instead of waiting.

I agree Matt. After seeing one of those I was pretty convinced that it's the closest thing to a "perfect" solution.

The turbos that are probably the most plentiful would be from Dodge 2.2 and 2.5 liter turbo cars. Find a junker and strip the turbo from it. The major difficulty would be getting it mounted to the exhaust manifold. I've been considering it using the manifold and turbo from a Turbo Sprint/Firefly, but it's going to be a while before it happens (like next year...or the next after that).

The added benefit of some mild turbo boost (unless the alternator steals all the energy) could improve highway mpg as well.

Well, I don't think what I have in mind would work as both a turbo AND an alternator.

i don't want to actually turbo my vehicle because it would require lots and lots of money and work. There is still no definate proof that doing so will actually help fuel economy either.

Anyway, this is what I'm talking about:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2005..._exhaust_.html

Yeah, that Tiger exhaust is what I read as well. And I agree about "no definite proof" regarding forced induction and FE - my statement was simply based on hearsay regarding the Turbo Swift-clones getting better FE at highway speeds than the NA clones.

It's something I'd like to try. The generator would be worth it on its own. If the turbo did help FE that would just be a major bonus.