There was some chatter a couple months ago about the possibility of solar-powered tuk-tuks — you know, the little three-wheeled mini-vehicles used all over Asia. But the pictures were bad and the idea was still in execution. No longer!
Wired’s Jeremy Hart is in the midst of a round-the-globe trip (sponsored by Ford), and happened across a solar tuk-tuk in the wild. They’re still pretty rare, it seems, both because they’re twice as expensive as the normal two-stroke ones, and because they’re not quite as practical as they could be. The solar panels can’t directly drive the motor, so it has to rely on gas anyway.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzxLw-IV3gQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]
It’s still a step in the right direction. The millions upon millions of dirty engines spewing carbon all over the hyper-dense cities of India and China are a serious ecological hazard, and of course they make the air so thick that you have to slice a piece of and chew it before you can breathe it. Let’s hope electric vehicles (and cleaner energy to power them) spread to these megacities soon.
[image: Wired]
