Battery Durability and Longevity

My understanding is that plugging in a Leaf whenever you have the chance will not be a problem at all. Just like the article states these batteries have sophisticated software controlling the charging. Our laptops have no such luck. While the chemistry and function of the battery pack in the Prius is very different I can state that my performance after six years has not changed yet.

@TechExplorer,
A tiny solar panel on the rear spoiler can't produce more than 2 or 3 watts max. At this rate, it would take more than 1300 days or 4 years to charge a 20 kWhr battery such as the Leaf's primary battery - not really worth the effort.
Covering the whole car with solar panels might produce 150 watts max so it could charge in a little over 26 days. Still hardly worthwhile.
What a solar panel really can do:
On hot days, when parked in the sun, a solar panel on the spoiler or roof can power a circulating fan. This will keep the inside temperature close to ambient temperature and thus permit a less-powerful, more efficient air conditioner. Car air conditioners are very powerful in order to bring the interior temperature down from well over 100 degrees to comfortable ranges quickly for passenger comfort. I suspect this is what the Leaf will do. It will also keep clocks and housekeeping computers from draining the aux battery when parked for a long time. If you want solar to power your car, put a multi-kWhr solar array on your house or carport. I have a 5.5 kWhr array on my house that offsets my daily 80 mile commute in an EV.
This is all good and probably worthwhile.

Hey TechExplorer,
Your brain is really going in full gear! I'm no solar cell or PhotoVoltaic (PV) expert by any means, however, I do know that a lot of the efforts in PV development for extremely high efficiency PV as used by satellites focuses on finding materials that capture as many spectra of the light as possible - just what you seem to be thinking about.
These so-called multi-junction cells have different layers made of different semiconductor materials, in rows III and V on the periodic table (eg Ga-AS, Ga-In-P, etc). Each layer captures different wavelengths of sunlight. Of course, as one stacks up layers, the lower layers get less sunlight since the higher layers filter out a lot of the desired wavelengths. I believe that the state of the art with multi-junction PV is around 4 layers and efficiencies of around 30% are being attained but they are extremely expensive to produce.
Commercial PV pretty much exclusively uses only a single Silicon junction because it is the cheapest and gets the most light from the sun of any other III or V column semiconductor. The best Si cells get around 20% efficiency today.
I don't know how much IR energy gets through on cloudy days but, since it is cold on rainy days, I suspect it isn't very much. I'm pretty sure that there isn't much at night. I doubt that it would be enough to be worth collecting - but I'd be happy to be wrong here!
Even 100% of the sun's energy only provides about 1 kW per square meter and the IR would be even less so it would take a lot longer than the 26 days to charge with visible light that I mentioned above, maybe a year?
Solar energy is great but it takes collection area to harvest it, no matter what part you take.

Flywheel could stay in motion for weeks