🌻⚡🇩🇪 NIX EUROPEAN DRIFT – THE ROBOT SUNFLOWER 🇩🇪⚡🌻
Today at Volkswagen Autostadt in Wolfsburg I stumbled across something that perfectly sums up German engineering.
A giant solar-powered flower.
Not a flower-shaped sculpture.
Not a decorative flower.
An actual robotic solar flower that spends all day following the sun across the sky, opens itself in the morning, closes itself at night, and folds itself away when the weather turns nasty.
Because apparently a normal solar panel wasn’t complicated enough.
The Smartflower produces up to 6,500 kWh of electricity per year and generates more power than conventional fixed solar panels because it constantly tracks the sun throughout the day.
As a campervan owner, I immediately started looking at it and wondering whether I could somehow fit one to Vanilla.
The answer is probably no.
For starters, it weighs around 800kg and has a wingspan of nearly 5 metres when fully open. Parking at Tesco would become challenging.
Still, standing there watching it, I couldn’t help but admire the thinking behind it. While most of us simply bolt a solar panel to a roof and hope for sunshine, the Germans built a giant robotic sunflower that actually chases the sun around the sky.
It’s gloriously over-engineered.
And I absolutely love it.
One of the joys of travelling is discovering things you never knew existed. You set off expecting Volkswagens and factories and end up fascinated by a giant mechanical flower generating electricity in the middle of a park.
Only in Germany.
🚐 Van: Vanilla
📍 Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Germany
🌍 Country No. 10 of the trip
☀️ Weather: Perfect for solar power
🤓 Engineering appreciation level: Extremely high
🌻 Desire to mount one on the campervan roof: Also extremely highRead more
May 30 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 23 °C