Since this five-watt Trickle Charger bears the Coleman brand, we were gonna put a joke here about Gary Coleman and “watt” choo talkin’ ‘bout, but it never quite came together. Oh, well

Behold! The power of the sun! It’s not just Superman’s garbage disposal; that big, hot gasbag at the center of our Solar System is the lone source of all energy here on planet Earth. For real!

When we hear people talking about solar-powered cars, we always say “oh, we’ve got a car that’s powered by energy from the sun.” Then we watch them do the old mandible dangle in disbelief. But it’s true! Sort of. It’s just that the process we use to convert the sun’s rays into fuel for our Rabbit… Well, it’s a complicated one. See, first the solar rays are collected by prehistoric plants, which are then compressed for millions of years into oil, which is in turn extracted from beneath the surface of the earth and refined into gasoline.

A car that was directly powered by solar energy, sure, that’d be cooler. But the only place you’re going to find one of those is in your sci-fi comic books, Schmendrick, take it from us. Maybe one day some egghead will invent one for the real-life commercial market, but in the meanwhile you can at least trickle-charge your car battery with Coleman’s five-watt solar panel.

It connects directly to any kind of 12-volt battery, not to the cigarette lighter. And it guards against the kind of juice drain you get during long storage periods or super-bad weather. So come summertime, you just turn the key in the ignition and your RV (or whatever) starts right up, no whine of protest.

Easy, right? Youbetcha it is. All you have to do is enjoy the drive. And maybe genuflect once in a while to Almighty Apollo, who, besides charging the occasional car battery, makes possible all life on Earth as we know it.

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