But Gallup did not measure individual willingness to make difficult personal changes in lifestyle.

IMO, we should be putting maximal effort into creating solutions that create little or no “discomfort” to the green-leaning adopter.

Wind farms are a good example of a low-personal impact solution. If sited correctly they create very little to no “visual blight”. The land owner makes some nice money while giving up only a small portion of his/her land. The outlets in people’s houses work exactly the same.

Very efficient refrigerators, CFLs that look like “real light bulbs” (and are “made cheap” by subsidies), white painted commercial roofs, …. Those things contribute to the overall solution and don’t get anyones bloomers in a bunch.

The Volt-concept PHEV is another good example. Looks like a normal car. Runs on normal fuel if need be. Only change is, if you plug it in from time to time you save a lot on your gas bill.

We need fixes now. Seamless transitions from inefficient to efficient are most likely to reduce atmospheric gas levels. It’s going to be harder to implement changes that we have to force. (That goes without saying, doesn’t it?)

This is the heart of the problem.

I submit that every poorly thought out, costly, and ultimately ineffective course of action taken due to panic will only set back real progress. The setback will come because US citizens will be ever harder to convince for each subsequent solution that is proposed.

Another problem occurs where promoters sell easy solutions that have very little quantitative effect, but deceive US citizens into thinking that serious adjustments do not have to be made.

It is also reality that real solutions have to be attractive to the whole world if they are to make a sufficient difference.

Then reflect on how much resistance there is to CFLs because the “look funny”.

The greenest solutions are ones that people will actually adopt.

Still, the Solar Challenge competition has served well as a design experimentation forum and shows possibilities that could be incorporated in real vehicles.

You make many insightful comments, but I would like to go further with your remark that the “Aptera faces significant looks-related market problems.”

It will ultimately come down to choices where we ultimately rank our ugly options. For my part I rank ugly from least to most: (1) Aptera, (2) fast trains, (3) slow light rail, (4) city bus, (5) family life in an urban apartment, (6) no electricity, (7) starving, (8) freezing to death.

Actually the Aptera is very attractive to my eye. But yes, it looks different and that does indeed count for a lot with many if not most people — at least for now.

The president of our Houston electric vehicle club just recently purchased a Zap truck with Solar panels and its charger went bad. So for the next 2 weeks it waited in the outdoors and by the time he received his new battery pack charger the car was fully charged from the solar panels. So while it can be possible to charge an EV’s battery pack from solar panels on the car it can’t possibly charge them up quickly enough to provide meaningful range to the vehicle.

The “perhaps” comes from an announcement that someone has developed a coating that allows panels to absorb light from all angles with very little reflective loss. But it has yet to prove itself in practical applications.

Then there’s the “best use” consideration. Solar panels make power during the day when that power can be sold to the grid at peak prices. Car batteries can generally be charged at night with less expensive off-peak wind power.

Additionally there is the problem of power loss once the batteries are full. Now any power that the panels might supply to the grid is wasted. To me it makes more sense to spend our panel dollars on peak feed-in and buy back cheap nighttime wind power.

While there might be a small number of people who drive short mileage, live where the sun is high and bright, and can find parking in full sun, it leaves the question if that market segment would support such a vehicle. In order to recover R&D, etc. these might be very expensive vehicles.