Lithium Related Media Articles, page-24047

You are right @Borrisbb it would contribute to the overall range but only very minimally. It's a matter of physics. With the available space on a car body, not enough sunlight would hit the panels to generate sufficient electricity. At this point in time even with highly efficient solar panels, the amount of energy they can generate is limited as they can only cover parts of the roof, bonnet, and possibly the boot. Think of how large an area you need on the roof of your home to generate even 5KWh. It's much greater than the area available on a car. Secondly, the power output from solar panels on a car might only be a few hundred watts under ideal conditions, which is way too small to fully charge the battery in a reasonable amount of time. It would take several days.

There may be advances in technology over time but we will always be limited by the sun's output which is somewhere around 1000 watts per square metre (in ideal conditions). We can't change that. The answer is to have a large array to capture more of the sunlight but with a car that's very limited.