Mission

Hello. I’m Omid.

I'm the founder of DartSolar. Before I tell you about the company, I want to tell you why it exists — because the “why” is really the whole point.

How it started

DartSolar began as a side project. I was tinkering in my spare time, asking a question that seemed obvious to me but that nobody was really answering: if cars sit in the sun all day, why aren’t they making their own electricity with solar panels?

The more I pulled at that thread, the more it unraveled into something bigger. What started as a weekend curiosity soon became a full-time obsession.

The problem few talk about

The world is racing to put hundreds of millions of electric vehicles on the road. That’s good news for the planet. But here’s the part that doesn’t make headlines: most countries don’t have the electrical grid to support charging all of them.

The wires in the ground, the transformers on the poles, the power plants behind it all — none of it was designed for what’s coming. Rebuilding that infrastructure takes decades and costs trillions at a global scale..

Why solar, and why now

Solar got cheap. Really cheap.

Panels today cost roughly half what they did six years ago, and the price keeps falling year after year. Solar is now one of the most affordable ways to generate electricity on Earth — cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas, and dramatically cleaner. Coal releases roughly twenty times more carbon per unit of electricity than solar. Natural gas, about ten times more.

At the same time, the panels themselves are getting better. New cell designs (perovskite tandems, if you want the technical name) are pushing efficiency to levels that seemed impossible a few years ago. The technology, the price, and the need are finally lining up at the same moment.

Your car as a power plant

Here’s something most people don’t think about: the average car is parked about 95% of the time. Even an active commuter’s vehicle sits idle around 80% of any given day. That’s a huge amount of surface area sitting in the sun, doing a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y nothing.

If every EV had roughly a kilowatt of solar on its roof — enough to run a fridge, a few lights, and a laptop for an evening — the cumulative effect would be enormous. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of cars, and you start to see a different kind of grid: one spread out across driveways and parking lots instead of concentrated in giant power plants.

There’s a quieter benefit, too. Slow charging — the kind solar does naturally — is much gentler on a battery than supercharging. Cars that sip the sun all day last longer than cars that gulp from fast chargers.

And because EVs already contain a massive battery, they can store that solar energy and feed it back to your home at night. Your car becomes a power plant and a power bank.

Decentralization is freedom

This is the part that gets a little philosophical, but I think it matters.

When energy production is decentralized — when your driveway is your power plant — you become more resilient. Storms, blackouts, fuel shortages, geopolitical chaos: none of it touches you the same way. While most households watch their electricity bills climb every year, solar owners lock in their savings for decades.

I believe the same logic applies to all the basics of life. The more independence each person has over their own food, water, energy, and shelter, the more freedom they have to do what humans are actually good at: create, build, learn, take care of each other. Decentralization isn’t just a technical strategy. It’s a way of giving people their lives back.

Built to be repaired

Most modern products are designed to be replaced. Ours are designed to be fixed.

We could have followed the “strategic obsolescence” playbook — make it disposable, sell more units, ship the broken ones to a landfill. We chose not to. DartSolar products are built to be opened, understood, and repaired. Where it makes sense, parts are 3D printable, so you can fabricate them at home or at a local maker-space. Our long-term goal is to grow a community of DIY engineers — people who don’t just fix our products but improve them, adapt them, and customize them for vehicles and use cases we never imagined. The best solutions tend to come from the people closest to the problem.

Let’s talk

If you have questions, reach out from our contact page — I read everything. For media, visit our press page. Thanks for reading this far. I hope you’ll join us.

— Omid