Sono Scraps Solar Car and Dismisses Almost Three-Quarters of Staff | Hacker News Reader

Sono Scraps Solar Car and Dismisses Almost Three-Quarters of Staff

bloomberg.com

37 pointsmarban45 comments

Solar car fans can still pin their hopes on Aptera [1] and on Lightyear which is rising again from bankruptcy [2], though both their futures still look rather shaky...

Personally, I think ditching the solar and just focussing on low weight and affordability like luvly [3] does, makes more sense, but obviously those are limited to shorter ranges.

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/02/10/aptera-has-raised-3m-of-its-2...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/22/lightyear-is-launching-...

[3] https://www.wallpaper.com/transportation/luvly-o-ev-from-new...

I really hope aptera succeeds. I personally would buy one, but I live and work where I’m surrounded at all times by most of the largest mass production vehicles. I’d never ride a motorcycle around here and feel safe. Solar wise though this is prime territory.

It might not do well in a collision with an F350, but an Aptera is considerably larger than it looks in pictures. It's wider and higher than a Tesla Model S. It'll fit a surfboard in the trunk, or a bicycle without any disassembly.

I really hope so too, but from my perspective, Aptera has been in perpetual vaporware since at least 2006.

Yes, they evolved into something different now with the advent of EVs, but they still no product to show for all their efforts. And now that 90% of manufacturers have their own EV, I'm not sure Aptera's use case even exists anymore outside of an extremely narrow market niche.

I hope Altera makes it to production. Solar aside, it's probably the most efficient EV based on weight and drag coefficient. You can plug it into 110V and get plenty of range for commuting, much less strain on the power grid, less battery materials needed.

It is by far the most aerodynamic at a Cd of 0.13. Next best is the 0.17 of either the experimental Mercedes Benz EQXX or of the cancelled Lightyear 0. My only reservation about the Aptera is the huge distance between the front wheels, which hampers maneuvering in tight spots, risks hitting curbs, and in the worst case other vehicles.

If you do the math, solar powered cars are not going to work. You just don't have the available surface area on a car to provide enough power to charge it in a reasonable timeframe. Plus solar panels add weight and manufacturing complexity. If you're building an electric car you would be better off spending your time trying to make the car more aerodynamic or weigh less. The only way I could see it working in a production vehicle is with an rv that can have its panels fold out while stationary. Any investor worth their salt could do 10 minutes of math and figure out that this is a terrible idea.

It doesn’t fill the whole tank, but on many days it can add 10-20km of range. Given that commute distances in cities (Europe) can be small, and given that in cities most won’t have their own garage to charge, this means you could get away with charging your car once week instead of twice.

In general I’d agree that this solar car thing doesn’t make sense, but Sono did make a compelling case and the whole package kind of made sense. But their execution and timing was off.

I don't think it's a timing or execution thing. You can have the best engineers and operations on the planet and it still wouldn't work. The benefits of the solar car are just not big enough when compared to a standard electric car.

Sono had thousands of pre orders, made millions with them. The overall package made sense to those people. And Sono didn’t lie on numbers. You need to spend more than 2 seconds on the target market before making snap judgements.

The problem is that in 5 years they didn’t make it to production. And they needed a bunch of money now, just at end of the EV bubble. They also did an IPO way too early, and in the IPO didn’t raise enough to get to production. These are all timing and execution mistakes, not market match/product issues.

It's inefficient enough (in terms of costs) to put lots of little solar panels on peoples' roofs, even more so to put even smaller ones on top of cars which are probably parked in the shade half the time. Where's the synergy?

Surely it's much more efficient for solar panels to be placed in a solar farm in a sunny location where thousands of panels are procured, built and maintained together utilising economies of scale.

Hell it's probably more efficient to have a solar field in sunny Texas / CA, then ship the energy in battery packs or hydrogen cells to a car in Minnesota.

It is not. Particularly the latter.

You're right, of course, but I was facetiously comparing vs. a few solar panels in a garage.

Solar panels are dirt cheap, so throwing them approximately everywhere makes good sense. We're not really limited in the number of panels we can produce right now. Rooftop solar is mostly expensive because installed costs are 10x the raw costs (around $3/W total compared to $0.30/W of panels). Installing them in a factory removes that bespoke assembly step. Everything that is manufactured, sits outside, and uses electricity might as well have solar attached

Panels are cheap, but integrating them into something like a car takes time and effort, and hardware to support charging from solar, all of which costs money.

It's even more money if you want to design a car that can obtain any measurable amount of range from solar.

Those costs are all distributed over the manufactured product, as opposed to requiring bespoke engineering and construction work on each installation. I would also argue that designing more energy efficient transportation is worth doing regardless of whether that includes solar or not.

Producing panels and charging circuitry has a carbon footprint. So does installing them. It's going to take a long, long time for car-mounted panels to offset that footprint, and even longer for the cost. On top of that there's costs associated with leaving your car exposed to sun all day which you have to factor in for everyone except drivers who have no choice but to do so.

You can actually get a pretty helpful trickle charge out of solar panels on cars, and their cost is so low that the slight convenience may be worth the expense.

This particular Sono car was rated to get up to 21 miles per day under ideal conditions. Let's say these numbers are extremely ideal and we only get 5 or 10 miles a day.

Let's say you go to the airport and park in the economy lot for a week, and you come back to your car having 35-70 miles of extra range than when you left.

I think if someone was buying a Tesla or some other popular EV right now and they had the option to put some solar panels on the roof that charged the car enough to add one or two miles of range per day I'd still see a lot of people paying one or two thousand bucks for that option.

That's a heck of a lot better than parking your car outside for a week and finding that the battery has slowly drained on you.

The costs for non-grid solar (like residential) seems to basically be labor.

The panels are generally made overseas, so funding/sponsoring that just exacerbates the trade imbalance / domestic solar industry, but subsidizing the labor is a form of "local spending" that will improve local economies and make the jobs better.

Since IMO residential solar should be a significant aspect of the USA's domestic energy policy, because it will help offset the grid impact of BEVs and make communities more resilient to disasters (and rapacious policy like the Enron days), I'm in favor of heavy subsidies to home solar.

Sad to hear, but ultra-efficient solar-charging EVs are the next step in EV evolution, and companies like Sono have demonstrated that there's no physical limitation on making a practical solar powered vehicle. I'm rooting for Lightyear or Aptera to make it through their current funding issues.

Is it really practical? My car is in a garage when I am at home. My car is in a garage when I am in the office. Street parking in the city isn’t practical either. The buildings hide the sun. Plus the car gets dirty much quicker than stationary solar panels installation. I would say, the advantage of such vehicle is rather limited.

Yeah, if the panels are so efficient that 8 hrs of sitting can charge 2 hrs of driving, then just put those panels on your roof and wire them into a garage charger.

The advantage is the convenience of not even needing to plug in at all. Quit thinking of solar cells as an expensive, limited commodity. They’re cheap. Cheaper literally than glass. About 10¢ per Watt at the cell level.

But you still have to plug in. Solar panels on a car will not make enough energy to run the vast majority of cars even if parked always in the sun.

And for the few it could, you're using it so little what's the point of even having it?

8 hours in the Sun is good enough for 2 hours of driving, according to that blurb. That’s like 100 miles of range added per day, and the battery can buffer multiple days. Who drives 700 miles per week? Maybe 10%? Aptera’s car charges 40 miles per day, which is the same as the average American’s round trip commute (and can buffer during the weekend as well).

The overall end point for solar charging is you’re charging enough that you don’t have to plug in unless you’re going on a road trip. I don’t know why it is hard to understand the basic idea or value of this. Most working people commute by car, and this concept would potentially allow all of the commuting miles by most people to be handled by the Sun. Home charging just no longer required. For sunny parts of the world (where people don’t park in garages, where they could plug in), that’s pretty awesome.

> 8 hours in the Sun is good enough for 2 hours of driving, according to that blurb. That’s like 100 miles of range...

Nope! They might want you to think that with misleading wording, but you'd be lucky for 2 hours of driving at 12 mph. And, again, that's only if the car gets full sun the entire day. At those distances, just get an electric bicycle.

EDIT: I don't know what blurb you refer to, but my search engine says https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/ used to say "on average 112km/week".

It was jvanderbot’s quip: “Yeah, if the panels are so efficient that 8 hrs of sitting can charge 2 hrs of driving, then just put those panels on your roof and wire them into a garage charger.”

Generally, it helps to take comments in context…

In his hypothetical, that’s clearly more than enough for the average person’s commute.

And even if it isn’t quite enough, it could reduce the frequency you need to make trips to a fast charging station (effectively like having a twice as large of a battery), if you cannot charge at home. Charging stations usually are substantially more expensive than residential, maybe 3-4 times the price, and residential is 4 times the price of utility scale solar power (due to buffering and distribution, etc). So there’s a good financial case for it if you can get the cost low, plus you have the added convenience.

Sono’s solar wasn’t very good. Lightyear and Aptera’s ability to add up to 40 miles per day is pretty useful… if they can get the cost down.

> Generally, it helps to take comments in context…

That’s true, but when the projection is off by roughly a factor of 10, it’s helpful to bring in the actual data.

Aptera is lying. There is no way that a typical driver will get 40 miles per day of solar charging with the panels that they're using.

Typical driver? Typical Aptera driver? Possibly…

Keep in mind an Aptera has the volume and weight and frontal area more comparable to a covered bicycle or golf cart while its top surface is mostly the same as a normal car. So even if regular cars can’t do it, an Aptera maybe can. If a Model 3 can get 4 miles per kWh, I can believe an Aptera can get 10miles per kWh, as it has only 2 seats (not 5), and is extremely streamlined. Top surface of an Aptera is about the same as a Model 3 (8m^2 if you treat it as a rectangle), and all of the top part would basically be covered with solar cells. (Even the front window would have cells on the dash to collect the sunlight going through it.) if the total full factor of that rectangle is 45% cells, with 20% efficient cells… that’s 800 Watts. With 5 hours effective sunlight per day, 4kWh per day is doable in sunny locations. 40 miles per day.

With just 800W, it’s okay if you’re using $2/Watt high efficiency conformal cells (as opposed to 10¢/Watt dirt cheap cells) as the cost is just $1600. That will pay back your Electrify America bill in just 2.5 years… or Supercharger (comparable to gas prices) in 3 years. Additionally, if you live in a place with crushingly high electricity prices but still has sun, you can pay back as well. And is more convenient than charging.

I hope Aptera’s business works, as the idea has merit.

Viability of 1hr per 4hrs charging aside...

I think I had implicitly assumed that most people with commutes do not park outside (and thus would miss the valuable daylight charging hours, and would thus be better off charging a wallpack at home). But in hindsight, I think that's incorrect. _most_ people probably park outside at work, wouldn't they?

those statistics would make or break a solar car.

By far most, I’d say.

And actually I’d say that parking garages and residential garages are both natural places for plug in charging. It’s street parking or vast (unlit) outdoor parking lots that would be a challenge for plug in charging, exactly the places that would work fairly well for solar car charging.

So I think it’s a valid niche. The issue is it’s still annoyingly expensive to place solar cells on car surfaces, and really we should use those high efficiency multijunction cells. Tandem perovskite cells are very promising there, getting both high efficiency (over 30% and rising) and low cost. But conforming shapes to car bodies is also a challenge. However if those can be solved, it’d be great to have this option.

The only place where you can get useful power is the largest RVs. As long as you can legally make them (length as almost 0 effect on wind resistance), cover the roof and sides with solar panels (knowing that one side is always in the shade).

Note that I said RVs not semi trucks. Semi trucks are meant to be driven all day (11 hours per day, though the law is more complex). Many RV drivers never drive that long in a day, and so we get a lot more stopped time where solar is charging batteries. Also we should assume that because space limited and they want a lot of power the person doing this paid extra for the highest efficiency panels, while less efficient ones are more cost effective for fixed installations.

The question really is only whether the solar cells pay for their weight and cost in the electricity they generate. I think the answer can be a qualified yes, depending on technology.

Fixed mount solar panels connected to the grid are more cost effective. You need less because you mount them at a reasonable angle and ensure they are not shaded: you immediately get at least twice as much power for the $ vs on attached to something moving down the road. Probably more as since efficiency isn't critical when you can just buy a few more cheap panels and put them up for less than the more expensive ones you need to get useful power from the limited space on a moving vehicle.

The grid also means that we can pipe energy around, so if your panels are shared the ones next door (next state...) can deliver power.

It costs about 35¢/kWh to charge at a Supercharger location (comparable to gas price). Electrify America charges 48¢/kWh.

For people who can’t charge at home or whatever, solar car charging could be a huge benefit, and it doesn’t matter in that calculation that utility scale solar is theoretically at like 4.4¢/kWh. Optimal angle, etc, is just a much smaller effect.

Rolled into the price difference above: there’s the cost of buffering the solar power to be charged at the right time, needing land for the solar panels, needing land for EV chargers, EV charging equipment, charge/discharge from storage, conversion inefficiencies, etc.

For most people noted enough sun falls on their car to handle their normal driving. Between bad angles, shade and other stuff cars will never be close to the ideal for charging.

Have you done the calculation? You have a source for “most people”? (Also, is there a problem if only 25% of people find it useful? That’s still 25%…)

Less than 50% of Americans own a garage or carport. So even if you're right, it's not a useful answer for half of Americans.

There is a physical limitation on making a practical solar powered vehicle. Even if the vehicle is parked outside and uses high efficiency panels it won't get much of a charge. Just a stupid idea from the start, bordering on being a fraud.

Yeah, I don’t see how people with even a mild understanding of energy and electricity can fall for a car powered solely by solar panels on its exterior. It’s utter snake oil if you look at the energy output of solar panels over time and the energy required to move a car just 1 km with no extra load (no driver).

https://archive.is/0XFsl

I could buy some electric car and stick solar cells all over the roof. Plus some wiring and a charge controller. That would be about a day's work.

If one day I need a car that can, say, play music for days at a festival in the summer, I'll do that.

Of course, to improve the range of the car with it, it wouldn't be worth it. The expense of a whole working day would be far too expensive for that.

I think solar cars are a scam. The victims are these investors with a good heart (save the planet!) but no clue at all about engineering or science.

They missed the market very badly. Back then the car was somehow innovative. But now is just a poor electric copy of Nissan Leaf/Honda jazz. Plus market is full of Chinese vehicles like MG4, funky cat and dozen others in the same price range. So timing is clearly crucial for a venture to fail or succeed.

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