#SolarPanels

Great road trips are the perfect time to leave behind the worries of urban life for something a little simpler – just you, your car, and the open road. But that doesn’t mean you  can’t leave all your tech accessories behind. That’s precisely where the Jackery Solar Generator 500 comes in – the ideal road-trip companion, keeping your gadgets fully loaded, so you can make the most out of all your exciting car adventures, travels and journeys.

Adding solar panels to the roof of an electric vehicle is a bit of a no-brainer, but an affinity for panoramic sun roofs complicates things slightly.

Yesterday Panasonic unveiled a next-generation solar roof panel that will be optionally used on the Japanese-market Toyota Prius Prime.

Ford is planning to install a massive solar array at its headquarters that will generate enough electricity to power roughly 158 homes annually.

Driving an electric car may be as green as you can get on the road, but being green at home means investing heavily in alternative energy. In an effort to combat that,  BMW and Real Goods Solar are teaming up to make solar panels more cost-efficient to intall at home for ActiveE drivers.

1,400 metric tons of diesel fuel is difficult to imagine from an average consumer perspective. That’s enough to power a diesel compact car for about 350,000 miles, much more than it would probably ever drive.

That’s also how much diesel Nissan will save every year thanks to a new transport ship which launched on its maiden voyage last Friday. The Nichioh Maru is the company’s newest freight liner and it’s making a splash in the green technology world thanks to it’s innovative design which offers an 18 percent fuel savings over similar ships without the technology.

The ship features 281 solar panels on the deck which power LED lighting throughout the ship. It also has a specially coated hull to reduce drag and is about the length of 1.5 football fields (557 feet).

The Nichioh Maru carries up to 1,380 cars and travels at a top speed of 24.4 mph or 22.1 knots to make two domestic round trips per week totaling just over 2,200 miles. Nissan released a video featuring the ship, you can watch it below.

In what’s being billed as an industry first in the United Kingdom, Toyota‘s manufacturing plant in Derbyshire, England, where it builds European market Avensis models as well as the Auris and Auris hybrid, is having a large scale solar panel array installed, in an effort to generate energy while reducing the plant’s carbon footprint.