Anyone who wants to travel long distances with a roof box on an electric car often faces the following problem: reduced range due to increased air resistance.
The charge in an electric car, such as a Tesla, is ideally enough for a distance of 500–600 kilometers—without a roof box, mind you. After that, it’s time to head to the next (hopefully free) charging station and (time-consuming) charge.
The range specified by the manufacturer can therefore no longer be achieved. This means either taking several breaks (to recharge) during the trip or leaving luggage at home. Neither of these is actually just wishful thinking.
For these reasons, an enthusiastic tinker in Sweden with a Tesla Model 3 decided to conduct an experiment. Together with a neighbor, he successfully developed a method to reduce air resistance: he mounted his roof box upside down on the car. This reduced the Tesla’s fuel consumption by about 16%.
The idea is good, but there's more to it—the weight
The approach taken in this experiment is very similar to the idea behind our roof box: not to compromise on performance or the driving experience.
Like the two inventors from Sweden, we also realized that the energy consumption of electric cars can be significantly reduced by improving the aerodynamic shape of the box. Therefore, the optimized design of our roof box is based on the shape of a raindrop. However, we have another idea for minimizing energy consumption, and that is to optimize the weight.
Since the material used in our ASPAHLTKIND roof box is a CO₂-neutral fiber composite (comparable to carbon fiber), we can reduce fuel consumption thanks to the box’s light weight. Nevertheless, the material makes our box much more stable than conventional plastic boxes, so that the often more than 500 electric horsepower can also be used for acceleration, braking, passing, and—in short—fun.
We’ll discuss this topic further in another blog post, but to give you a preview: the ASPHALTKIND roof box will serve as a technology platform by replacing environmentally harmful carbon fibers with CO₂-neutral fibers. Very few people realize this, but producing carbon fibers requires a great deal of energy, which results in extremely high CO₂ emissions. The same applies to the recycling process, which is currently not carried out at all due to cost and CO₂ concerns, and the (defective, no longer used) carbon part is simply “stored.”
So you see that you shouldn't settle for anything that involves compromise.
And for those of you who are now wondering whether our roof box looks just as good on other electric cars, we can assure you: it doesn't have to be a Tesla. Our roof box also looks perfect on other electric cars, such as the Porsche Taycan, the Audi e-tron Sportback, the Mercedes EQC, and many electric cars yet to come. The future is green and sustainable.