As a person who lives in SF, doesn't have a garage, owns a model 3, and uses outdoor street parking, I have to disagree. The convenience of not having to periodically go to a charging station and pay a major premium for that electricity might be well worth it.

Where I usually park, it's sunny 90% of the time, not too hot, and mostly unshaded. This sounds pretty close to optimal, so according to the article I could probably expect to be topped off most of the time with a good panel setup.

I probably drive around 50 miles a week (not counting longer road trips) and lose charge while parked as well. Accordingly I charge up once every 2 weeks or so for about $15-20. That's about $400 a year. Not even accounting for the help on longer road trips, that makes things financially worth it in just 4-6 years for me. That's not even to mention how much more convenient and time saving it could be.

I think the thing that would have me most concerned is the possibility of having my car broken into and losing the panels to theft... So probably a pipe dream for now.

Never underestimate the community. The Github project is gone, the people are not. I'm pretty sure they will find an good alternative to github (with Issues, Pull Requests and so on) to continue the collaborative work on youtube-dl.

Author here — thanks for checking this out, everyone! Happy to answer any questions in comments.