Helmond-based solar car maker Lightyear suspends car production, switches to building solar roofs

Comments

• Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Are the solar panels even efficient enough at those angles to the sun to generate more electricity than they cost in weight?

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yes, by a small amount, unless you live in the arctic circle or something.

    But does that mean they’re worth it? Probably not. There’s the financial cost as well as the weight. Plus potentially eating into head room. Plus it’s another thing to potentially go wrong.

    I certainly see the use case for campervans - a large flat roof is ideal, and being able to charge a leisure battery without flattening your main battery or running an engine seems perfect.

    But for a passenger car, the use seems less useful.

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Maybe with some of the super cheap perovskite cells coming out? Maybe.

      It’s a very marginal idea, at best. Even in equatorial regions under perfect weather, there just isn’t that much solar power you can collect with the space of a car roof.

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  • DoomBot5@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Aptera is attempting to do this. They had to engineer their own solar panels for the car. Probably the closest thing they have to production ready. They also had to make the car super efficient to make it work. Peak output of their design is about 700W

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    • Cort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So, fewer than 10 miles per day in perfect conditions?

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Geeze, a <$1000 e-bike conversion kit can put out more than that.

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• ThatsMrCharlieToYou@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is a real bummer. I saw these guys on The Fully Charged Show a couple of years back and it looked incredibly promising. But the auto industry is not easy to break and investors know that. Hopefully the solar roofs will prove profitable enough for them to try again.

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  • Nilz@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    IIRC, part of the reason why and how they declared bankruptcy and restarted was because they then no longer had to fulfil any preorders (but also didn’t pay customers back due to the bankruptcy). So customers got screwed over.

    Car industry is difficult but these kinds of practices sound extremely fishy.

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    • ThatsMrCharlieToYou@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I was not aware of that! Thank you for mentioning it. It has always seemed crazy to me that customers have no charge over assets on bankruptcy. In a better world, that’d be the case but that’s not the world we live in.

      As an aside, this is the sort of thing that is going to hinder investment in small firms in the auto industry, further compiling the issue of a few manufacturers setting ridiculous prices for their vehicles.

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