Smart Solar Powered Electric Vehicle: IoT- Enabled Cloud Data Engineering for Performance Optimization

This paper presents the design and development of a solar powered electric vehicle prototype integrated with Internet of Things based monitoring and cloud driven analytics for performance optimization. The objective of this study is to address the challenges of limited charging infrastructure and energy inefficiency in conventional electric vehicles by utilizing renewable solar energy combined with intelligent data engineering. The prototype is developed using a 12V solar panel, lithium ion battery, ATmega328 microcontroller, INA219 sensor, relay module, wireless charging coil, ESP Wi-Fi module, and a 16×2 LCD display. Real time operational parameters such as voltage, current, and battery status are collected and transmitted through Wi-Fi to the ThingSpeak cloud platform for continuous monitoring. The collected data is further processed using Azure Data Factory, Blob Storage, and Databricks to perform advanced analytics including solar panel efficiency evaluation, charging and discharging cycles, energy consumption trends, and anomaly detection. Results from experimental trials show that the integration of solar charging with IoT based monitoring improves sustainability, reduces dependence on conventional grid charging, and provides actionable insights for enhancing energy management. However, limitations such as dependency on weather conditions, restricted storage capacity, and efficiency losses in wireless charging were identified. The findings emphasize the potential of combining renewable energy, IoT, and cloud computing to develop next generation sustainable electric vehicles, while highlighting future directions such as predictive analytics, hybrid energy models, and scalable fleet wide implementations.