It went well! Until the moment when it wasn’t going well anymore.
In 2019, a Dutch startup showed a prototype of an electric car Lightyear Onewhich promised to obtain most of the electrical energy from solar radiation:
In the fall of 2022, serial production began at the rate of one car per week. The car was called Lightyear 0but the price tag of around 7 million crowns was a bit scary.
At January’s CES, there was talk of a second model Lightyear 2, which would only cost 900 thousand crowns! That already looked promising. The car was supposed to be ready by 2025.
And then it came. On Monday, January 23, Lightyear he announced stopping the production of model 0, but he tried to put the information to the fore that he was concentrating on the development of the inexpensive model 2. But on Friday, January 27, message about bankruptcy.
After the battle, everyone is a general
…but still allow me to question the promised effect of car-integrated solar cells.
Lightyear 0 was supposed to get energy from the sun for a range of up to 70 kilometers per day. The power of the best current panels is around 200 W per 1 m². The creators fit 5 m² of panels on the car, so the peak power under absolutely ideal conditions should be exactly 1 kW.
However, such conditions only occur on a sunny day in the summer for perhaps four hours, which, with a real consumption of around 15 kWh, and taking into account other losses when storing energy in the battery, simply does not work out very well. The creators state that “free energy” varies by location, and the one given refers to the south of Spain.
Although the idea of obtaining energy directly on the roof of the car is interesting, it is not yet possible with the current efficiency of photovoltaic cells.
