What Features Do You Want to See In Next Gen Lightning?

[Daragh]

Timely OTA updates that are fully validated and are not a random act of God as to who gets them and who doesn’t! Ohhh wait that should be on all model years! Everything else is pretty much irrelevant.

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[Timeless Epoch]

edit: just realized I responded to an old post. Not sure if it’s still relevant.

Climate Controls from App

I have this.

 

[Realtruck]

Hard Solar Tonneau cover

This one caught my eye: Do you mean like one that's solar powered to operate electronically, or one that is a solar panel material that could work to charge the Lightning? Either way, both are genius in their own respect. I could see both being beneficial to the EV build.

I remember reading a thread somewhere that was an article on a automotive company that was working on a solar paint for EV. The concept is next level, and it would be interesting to see how something like that would work for future models.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

• Hard Solar Tonneau cover

Regarding a solar tonneau cover: This would be nice, but IMO it should come with a small-ish auxiliary battery, about 5 kWh. The benefit of solar on an EV is not single-trip range improvement. It's not realistically possible to charge a 400 or 800 volt battery with the surface area available for PV--you can't get 400 or 800 volts at any sort of meaningful amperage to be useful in the short term.

Instead, the approach I use is that I trickle charge an auxiliary battery during the day with 400 watts, 12 volts, then I use a L1 charger connected to the auxiliary battery to dump that energy into the truck at night. This gives several extra trips worth of charge over a year and it gives a few extra tens of miles over a long, sunny weekend---great for boondock camping. The problem with my approach is that I have to manage 400+ watts of solar panels. Those are a PITA and I would love to have a solar tonneau or bed cap and a solar roof panel (instead of the sun roof).
Telo is claiming to offer a solar roof panel, a solar tonneau and a solar bed cap. I'll believe it when I see it. I don't think their engineering will work out to make those affordable or useful, but I hope I'm wrong.

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