By the way, I am not advocating a tiny little solar car as the way of the future. I am only referencing it because it is my only serious exposure to electric vehicles and large battery packs.
We do have a good bit of instrumentation, including automated battery monitoring, the usual stuff, array performance. We will soon be adding accelerometer, GPS (Hopefully survey grade), and more thermal sensors. It is all transmitted over high power 900mhz transmitter.
I agree that 'comfort' systems would definitely be very significant parasitic losses. The vehicle itself is not comfort oriented at all.
