Lightyear unveils the first long-range solar car on June 25 | Hacker News Reader

Lightyear unveils the first long-range solar car on June 25

lightyear.one

37 pointsSanderMak58 comments

I've ordered the Sono Sion¹ electric car. It has solar cells (1200W max) that will charge the car during the day adding - on average - 10km range per day (34km max in the summer).

I only drive a few kilometers per week. If everything goes well I won't have to charge the car for months.

The Sion has a rather small battery so its range is only 250km or so. Enough for me, but that's something that a significant number of people are not yet comfortable with.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sono_Motors_Sion

Thank you for this comment because it puts one of the solar cars (at least the Sono Sion) in context--10 km range per day. It's a great option if that that work for you!

The Wikipedia article says: "By the use of older – and thus no longer legally protected – components of traditional car manufacturers this low price compared to other electric cars is possible". Can anyone shed some light on this?

Maybe they mean they are using old designs no longer protected by patents?

The linked article says: "The Sion developers have deliberately combined several older - and thus no longer patented - components of traditional automakers in the car."

> I only drive a few kilometers per week.

Is it even worth owning a car to only drive a few kilometers per week, which seems to imply under 200 miles per year? The fixed costs would seem terribly onerous on a per-km basis.

i suppose if for some reason you can't ride a bike. Dangerous roads is a common limiter, or needing to carry heavy stuff.

Honestly, bikes are a hassle. Too easy to steal. I used to ride everywhere with my bike, but the mental drag of having to find a safe spot, chain it (and even then, many guys carry around large nut cracker) .. it killed biking except for pauseless round trips.

Comments like this make me appreciate living in Japan even more.

Luckily, i haven't had an issue with bicycle theft in over a decade. I'm using a dutch-style frame lock and a steel cable. It's a lot faster than finding a parking space for my car.

Car parking spot are hell too, but car theft is massively more dangerous for the perpetrator.. if your bike gets stolen, the chances of it being looked after and found are .. slim ?

Great for commuting though, when you can bring it inside at both ends.

That's an important question. Sometimes I need to drive more. For now the answer is "yes", but perhaps this will be the last car i ever own.

> The Sion has a rather small battery so its range is only 250km or so.

So twice that of a Nissan Leaf?

It's not much less than my terrible petrol Kia (220 miles / 350 km on a full tank).

The 2018 Leaf in my garage will do 250km. The new Leaf plus is up to 360 km.

Yes, and 2018 is the first year of the redesign with extended range. The previous generation had significantly shorter ranges.

The name is rather bizarrely the inverse of the excellent Japanese director Sion Sono(1), popular and world famous (or at least instantly found via an internet search) since his 2001 hit, Suicide Circle(2).

The car looks great - does anyone know anything further about the naming?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sion_Sono 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Club_(film))

If few means 1-3, that means just today in under an hour I may have walked more than you drive for two weeks.

Hasn't the math already been done? There's just not enough sunlight exposure to get anywhere near the power requirements for a mid-sized vehicle.

You end up with tiny boxes on wheels covered in very expensive and fragile panels that only work in perfectly bright and sunny days. Impacts, accidents, maintenance, and manufacturing externalities are all against this approach.

Yes, and even if you were to cover something with the surface area of a Tesla model S in triple junction GaAs pv cells, and park it in direct sun all day, you might collect a cumulative 25kWh of charge in a whole month. Basically the same as 25% of a single charge of the car.

If you want to have a pv powered electric car, install twenty 370W panels (72 x 156mm high efficiency monocrystallin silicon each) on your roof and feed the local grid utility.

Solar powered cars such as you see racing across Australia are special ultra lightweight research projects, stripped down to the bare minimum, and with motors/gearing that results in a time of something like 30 seconds for 0 to 100km/h.

If you want to do the rough math on an absolute perfect case for kWh per month, go to the NREL pvwatts tool online, plug in the numbers for a theoretical 1000W pv array (same as 4 x 250W panels) at your location. Look at the cumulative kWh production estimate per month. This would assume that the car spends 100% of its time outdoors in the sunlight.

That math is very wrong. A model 3 sized car is ~2m x 5m and has room for side panels. At 20% efficiency that’s ~2kw in direct sunlight. Ignore panel cost and 40+% efficiency is possible for ~4kW in sunlight. Now at highway speeds that only adds up to edit: ~8 to 17% increased range which is hardly worth the expense.

Exactly, how much of a car you can cover in panels and how much time it sits in shade or garage makes this less appealing. But, getting ~50 miles of useful range per day at reasonable cost in ideal conditions is very possible.

I think you will find that if you put the effective non-glass surface area of a model 3 in direct sunlight... Half of the car will be in shade. Half of the car will be angled at a less than optimal angle (such as 35 degree fixed tilt, aimed directly south, for a ground mounted PV install). I would be extremely surprised if a model 3 or S covered in PV cells produced anywhere near 2000W in direct sunlight.

My best estimate is that it's a really charitable back of the napkin figure to say that a model S sized vehicle with every square cm available of body panel covered in PV cells might be equivalent to four 250W panels.

The math is, roughly, and this is output from 30 seconds with the pvwatts tool. This is for a fixed ground mount or roof mount array of 4 x 250W panels, tilted at 20 degrees aimed directly south. Not on a car.

Worst month of the year, december: 97kWh produced

Best month of the year, july, 165 kWh produced.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/OcK8z2b

Keep in mind, that production estimate is for four panels that have unobstructed view to the sky 24x7 for a month, and begin receiving sunlight as soon as the sun comes up in the morning, and keep receiving it every minute of the day until the sun sets. Every day for a month. Not how you would see a car used.

Probably a lot less than that, since any high efficiency PV cells are not curved, and if you're talking about surfaces that are curved in more than one axis, that entirely rules out using big 156mm monocrystalline Si cells. And there's no way in hell that anyone can afford to be using 33% efficient space grade GaAs PV cells on a car.

Ignore the panel cost? Have you ever actually priced gallium arsenide triple junction PV cells?

If you have actually installed and put into use an off grid PV system and watched its output through a whole solar day, you would understand.

That’s assuming you’re stuck with the shape of a model 3 rather than building a model 3 sized car. The aerodynamics suck, but a VW camper had basically a flat roof on top of a rectangle. The roof is not going to have an ideal tilt, but side panels will provide real value. In reality you are not stuck with full sized panels so as long as you avoid long curves you can still have a reasonable shape.

PS: Fairly high efficiency flexible pannels are also available. https://portamaxpower.com/products/330-watt-high-efficiency-... Which you can use in some areas to have a more aerodynamic design without sacrificing much solar efficiency.

Buy one of those and try flexing it. I have held similar products in my hands. It's still built from individual 125mm sized monocrystalline si cells. It's a little bit flexible, but not like you think, and certainly not going to curve to fix a multidimensional curve of a car body panel. It's not flexible like a vinyl car wrap, or even the material of a zodiac boat, it's flexible in the same way that a 1cm thick foam insulation board is flexible.

It's also ridiculously expensive compared to the $0.48/watt STC cost of big 72-cell panels by the pallet load.

Its 4-8% increased range, if driving continuously, but who does that?

I would guess most people (Europeans at least) travel less than 50 miles a day, that potentially means you never need to plug your car in.

But as you say this is ideal conditions, and isnt likely to reliably work out that way, so you're still going to have to plan to plug your car in, so agreed, not worth the expense.

And it's 4-8% increased range assuming that for 100% of your trip, all of the PV cells are exposed to direct sunlight. No clouds, no weather, and that all of the cells are somehow magically getting the best possible angle of sunlight.

Go watch a clamp ammeter on the output side of a 12 x 360W panel off grid PV array and tell me what the wattage is when a few clouds pass over. The cumulative kWH per month figure is what you should care about - but for that particular 4 hour period of the cloudy day, you'll be lucky to see 400W total from all of the panels together.

Exactly, it's not very even. I have some stats from my 3.85kW grid connected array, taken from the flashing light on the meter: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html

(click a day bar to see a drilldown)

There's just not enough sunlight exposure to get anywhere near the power requirements for a mid-sized vehicle

Using that logic we shouldn't build a single power station because it doesn't cover the power requirements of the whole country.

You can't use that logic, because the two aren't even equivalent.

The solar panel on the roof of that car is there to generate electricity just as much as a power station is. The difference is scale.

But a power plant is small compared to the city it powers,solar panels on the roof of the car however.........

Yeah, but solar farms are typically located in areas where there is abundant sunlight through out the year, not the same for cars

Scale brings efficiencies, and this is especially evident in power generation. A basic solar roof installation delivers far more power with more reliability. Also everything has trade-offs and the massively increased costs, manufacturing effort and maintenance requirements are certainly not worth it compared to current electric vehicles.

Are you really going to pay $200k for this vehicle with low performance and amenities, high repair costs, and no guarantee that it can ever really power itself - only for the potential to save a few hundred in electricity costs?

> The page isn’t redirecting properly

http://archive.is/93QX3

> Unable to connect

It's just not my day, I guess :)

I am getting the same issue.

"from €149.000" sounds a bit too much

I can imagine solar panels being helpful if your car is parked in the sun during the day, allowing you to commute using the charge from that, but I struggle to see how this would help maximise the range. Wouldn't the 12km/h charging be inconsequential to a long car journey?

Yes, but this is probably meant for daily commute in which case (in the Netherlands at least, where this company is based) the commute usually is about 30-40km which makes it doable.

If you look at it: if they can deliver about 3-4kW of power (quite high, I guess they wont get there any time soon) you can manage to do all the things a normal car (gas) would do with the accessory belt (usually about 6hp max). So power the AC/Stereo/screens/windows/lights etc. It's not a lot but you get some extra miles from your charge which is always nice.

It depends on the situation. If the car will be parked outside then charging 12km/h is very nice. During 8h at work that's 96km charged, that's enough for a daily commute and some shopping.

I would see the value for something in keeping the A/C going at a reasonable power without tapping the battery when you have to leave the car out in the sun. Also if you commute and can get a "free" recharge every sunny day.

Assuming you take a long trip where you average 80Km/h you still get over 100Km of extra range which is not bad.

My (UK) commute is 10 miles each way, so 3 hours of daylight would keep it topped up. And I have to park outside. It would be _perfect_ for my use case.

If their numbers add up this could be a game-changer.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to charge cars from electricity gathered from solar urban roofs ? Car parks would make ideal areas to cover with solar roofs in the style of gas-station roofs. They'd be generating electricity and keeping the cars beneath cool

I'm honestly surprised Tesla etc aren't already doing this. I also feel that what we've seen with Tesla's struggles to bring cars to market, Lightyear would be better off partnering with an existing company rather than trying to launch their own vehicle.

Another solar car, still a couple of years away from production: https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/

An interview and demo of the Sono Sion on Fully Charged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLZKdkgB85k

Fully Charged also has an interview and a ride along in the Lightyear One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSbWwn_YCr8

> 250km on a 35kWh battery

> up to 34 kilometers of additional range per day

4.75kwh from solar panel in 8 hours

600 watt solar panel average power

4m^2 solar panels give or take

back of the envelope calculation checks out, this would be a great commuter car.

All I care about from that first link is the moss in the dashboard. That's incredibly cool.

This car is $150k. I think the benefit is negligible, especially for the cost. Tesla is right to focus on lower prices and wide appeal.

So it's the kind of car you buy for your private island where you want a vehicle that can sit around indefinitely with occasional use and not require any maintenance, and where cost is no object.

No, for that you buy a 1988 Toyota Hilux

A friend of mine owned an Audi from 2003 that had a solar-covered sun roof feeding into the AC. On sunny days it would at least exchange enough air while parking so turning on the AC for small trips was not necessary. Just brilliant!

Fully Charged just released a full 20 minute video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSbWwn_YCr8

Sounds like Lightyear are trying to create some "Buzz". (Sorry)

This seems a little contradiction, I don't understand it:

The 4-wheel drive car is designed to go for long periods without cable charging. The battery alone has a range of 600-800 kilometers, depending on the usage. When it does need to be charged, the model’s energy efficiency makes it charge two or three times faster than any other electric car on the market. This means drivers can charge up to 400km overnight with an ordinary power socket

"without cable charging" but "can charge up to 400km with an ordinary power socket" :\

From your own quote:

> The 4-wheel drive car is designed to go for long periods without cable charging.

It can do both.

> This seems a little contradiction, I don't understand it:

> The 4-wheel drive car is designed to go for long periods without cable charging.

It is the long periods that are without cable charging, not that cable charging is not needed to drive long periods.

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