Lightyear One
lightyear.one
lightyear.one
Specs say "up to 70km" of additional solar range per day; which I'm assuming is perfect alignment of the sun with the panels for the whole day. So realistically it'd be 10km (or 3%ish of the total plugin range) if its a cloudless day and you park in full sun (this is a wild guess but seems realistic).
If you ask me, its not a huge boost, but its more than I would have expected.
That would roughly match what Aptera is claiming. Aptera has a more radical design, but looks like it might have less panel area.
EEVblog 1480 - Lightyear Zero Solar Powered Electric Car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIokNnjuam8
Really, if the solar panels do enough to let me run the radio and maybe charge a phone... that's pretty good. Where I live, I need to have a car, and if that car can double as an emergency source of power, all the better.
That said, the price tag is way too high, but it would be great of some of the ideas this car represents found their way into more modest vehicles.
Rear-view cameras are neat, but the one time I tried one I found rapidly switching focus between a car 50 feet ahead and a screen 1 foot away to be rather tiring for my eyes.
Maybe I'm just not the target market for this sort of thing.
It's VERY bright at nighttime, which I think could probably be fixed with an OLED panel and working ambient light sensor. Additionally the volume controls are capacitive buttons to the left of the display. I've seriously considered modding in a manual volume knob because of how annoying it is to adjust while trying to pay attention to the road.
I can't even imagine having to adjust things like windows, windshield wipers, or climate control all with a touch screen.
It's super fun when parked to have the big screen and play games with the kids, it adds a ton of bonding time that would otherwise be not quite as fun.
I wouldn't mind a physical wheel similar to the newer Ford Explorer's where a rotatable wheel is affixed over the touch screen so that it feels like it's part of the touch screen.
I find it incredibly helpful and not distracting at all.
That means that BEST CASE we have 5x2 = 10 m^2 of area, receiving 1400x.25 W of power each, so we are collecting 3.5KW of power.
A typical EV gets 7km per KWh
So that means that per hour of charging in the most perfect sun, with the world's most amazing panels, using the world's most efficient charger and battery, for a car that is quite oversized and all covered with panels buys you .... 24.5 km of driving.
A little further north, add in some clouds, remove windshield area since that part needs to be transparent, account for inefficiencies, and angles, maybe you get 5 km of driving per hour of charging during the day, if you're lucky...
Yeah.. i call bullshit on this being anything more than a gimmick
FYI: Solar-powered race cars can go 88km/h: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-technology/world%C...
Having said that, if you throw in the required safety features and basic creature comforts of a modern car that's going to add a lot of weight but I wouldn't be surprised if such a purely solar-powered car could reach ~30MPH (with a 0-30 time of like 30 seconds =)
With the right balance of batteries-to-weight I wouldn't be surprised if you only needed to charge the car for like 8 hours to get 100 miles of range at highway driving speeds (on a sunny day with solar assist). The 1000-mile range is probably only possible if you're doing like 30MPH with the wind at your back with the sun beating down the entire time.
The difference between this and the Roadster is that, the Roadster was cool, this is...goofy looking and practical.
I can see this appealing to the "hyper-miler" crowd, but that's not the crowd that would want to or could drop six figures on a car.
I guess if you live in the desert, and every week you park your car for 6 days and drive 1 day.
I drive a Nissan Leaf. It gets 5.5 mi per kWh in the summer, 4.8 in the winter. My commute is about 7 miles 1-way. So less than 3kWh used daily assuming I just commute.
They have a 1kW solar panel on their car. If I had a car with the efficiency of my Leaf that charged from a 1kW panel every day, it's conceivable that for my specific use case I would rarely ever charge.
That said I don't think my case is typical and I am not a large enough market segment to cater to. Nor would I ever trade my dirt-cheap Leaf for whatever exorbitant price these things will cost.
One trick is to swap out the old 12V lead-acid battery they insist on sticking in electric cars with modern LiFePO4 ones to immediately save 20-25 pounds. Aluminum or alloy wheels might save another 50+ pounds if the car doesn't already have them. So it's conceivable to carry one or two 50 pound solar panels for free. An inverter and additional batteries to buffer the charge will add some weight though, since most electric cars have the artificial limitation that they can't charge while driving.
Nor does it particularly need a "whole assembly" for mounting etc, as it would be built directly into the roof of the car. It may well be that using a solar panel to replace the metal skin of the car will turn out to be equal or less weight than it otherwise would be, though of course much more expensive.
A typical 1kW panel weighs about 40lbs, of which about 9lbs is the actual silicon producing the energy, and the rest is the protective glass, silicon backing, and structural material around the edges. It seems to me that if the panel is specially made to fit into a car roof as-manufacturered in place of a metal roof, a lot of that wouldn't be needed as it would be built into the roof anyway, and the added panel weight would be pretty negligible.
The DC produced by the panel can also be directly used to charge the battery, no need for inverters.
I live in the high (semi) desert in northern New Mexico, and for myself and a lot of my neighbors, that's precisely the situation we're in.
Doesn't mean we would drop $255k on a car, however. For that kind of money, I could have a ground mount array plus batteries that could provide enough juice to recharge a conventional EV in a couple of hours.
But few people will want to drop XX,000 for a car that they have to leave outside all the time.
Speaking as a person who parks his 2007 Camry under a tree every day.
On the other hand, if you live in an apartment and park somewhere that doesn't provide charging, then panels could extend your range such that you only have to use a public charger every couple of weeks rather than a couple of times per week.
If you do a lot of long out of town trips, the extra range might out-weight the loss in range from extra weight of the panels. Hard to say.
However, in no case are the benefits worth the $250k cost.
I did a bit of math once to work out if panels could power my (future) Cybertruck and it wasn't even close.
So maybe they have very efficient panels and the car is very light? But the Lightyear One as described on the (marketing) site is not obviously possible.
For this price you'd be better off buying a luxury ev, getting a new roof on your house and installing solar there. you'd have money left over and be able to actually put a meaningful charge on your car using solar that way.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the car itself is more like recumbent bicycle - ultra efficient vehicle with solar on top.
Even if it only gives you 20% of your commute, or 10 miles per day or w/e, what's wrong with that? It is better than burning a fossil fuel, also better than burning a fossil fuel far away, transporting the energy and pretending it's clean now ...