Probably because each individual comment can be linked to, and there is no strict definition of whether or not “www.example.com/foo” is the same as “www.example.com/foo?comment=2″.

So Google takes its best guess, and lets us override.

You’re absolutely right that there aren’t really 164,000 people who have posted this.

But when I do Google the phrase with quotes and go fairly deep into it, I find that hundreds of the links are for the very same Huffington post, dunno why. I still find it inconceivable that there were 164,000 reprints of the AP piece.

Although when I actually go through the results I hit this:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 98 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

So there are maybe only 98 entries on the Internet, with 163,902 duplicates of it.

…looking forward – with regenerative braking, solar charging, and other means to charge a (future) battery pack, it might just be feasible to have a “free/low cost to operate” car.

Of course I AM a conspiracy theorist so I am sure the companies that PRODUCE electricity and gas would never allow solar (or wind for that matter) power to gain any more than a token market share!

If you actually penetrate the “164,000″ references, you’ll see that by about number 350 they’re down to linking to a reference to a “Toyota solar-powered keychain,” whatever that is.

It must amuse the hell out of the Google people, since everybody does it. I’ll bet if I Google my own name I’ll get thousands of hits. 20 of them will be me and 10,000 will be every Stephan and every Wilkinson reference on the Internet.

A flat 15 ft**2 panel generates 200 watts at peak. In an hour, it’s the juice necessary to go a mile.

That’s not a lot but it’s also not so bad. If something conformable to the aerodynamic surface of the vehicle can be engineered, at reasonable cost and efficiency, it will probably make its way into the market.

It wouldn’t be the worst gimmick ever put onto/into a car.

Our solar array is roughly 9 square meters, cost $40,000, and generates the equivalent of about 2 hp with 20% efficient solar cells. Even if the cells were 100% efficient, you would still only get ~10 hp.

The thing is crazy fun to drive, though…

If you could get two square meters of solar panels that converted sunlight to electricity at 100% efficiency (in the real world we’re around 20%), one hour of pure sunlight would get you about 2Kwh, which would go about ten miles.

This is avoiding the extra cost and maintenance of solar panels flying around town at 50mph.

If you want solar, put it on your house.