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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

This article is thin on content and wrong on many many points.

1° the Lightyear Zero is actually in production. There is no reason to think the cars built won't be sold soon...

2° the lightyear 0 has a sophisticated series of controllers for its solar cell that can activate solar cells independantly, therefore it's definitely no losing 50% of its power when 5% of the panel is in the shade.

3° dust doesn't reduce solar output that much. Washing the panels once a year is generally enough, and most people wash their cars more often than that.

I love back-of-envelope calculations to check for lies, but they shouldn't preclude making your minimal homework first...

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Bad news - LY0 is already out of production, after an astounding production rate of 1 car per week. This just is a niche of a niche of a niche idea, high cost, low return.

Wiki: he company announced in December 2022 that production had begun, at a rate of one car per week. Availability is currently limited to customers in the EU, Switzerland, Norway and the UK.[4] However, in January 2023 it announced that production of Lightyear 0 has been suspended to redirect their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2

Following to source article: Helmond based Atlas Technologies which is responsible for production of the Lightyear 0 solar powered car, was declared bankrupt on Thursday, with the loss of 620 jobs. Parent company Lightyear had asked for court protection from creditors for the unit earlier this week, after announcing that production of the 0 model would stop. Read more at DutchNews.nl:

It is a shame, they had a really promising car.

Their design is based on a hyper efficient car, with a smaller, and thus cheaper battery. The solar panel is a small benefit, but would overall provide the car with more range per kg and $.

But to become affordable it needs major investments for reaching mass production, which nobody wants to do.

They still have the holding that owns the IP, so I suspect they will try to sell parts of their design to other car makers. Especially their in-wheel motors are very efficient.

I think a lot of these startups would have been better served as trying to be specialist OEMs for the one or two things they really innovated on and not tried to make a whole car. Imagine if they were selling the old school car makers their highly efficient motors being built out of a single factory with no support network or retail stores needed. Instead of trying to take on the behemoths in an extremely low margin business.

I think the EV startup and SPAC IPO craze is really the final blow out top of the ZIRP bubble.

Look at mobileye for example. Instead of trying to mine gold, sell shovels.

The problem with that is, they can't raise money on that and the OEMs take 5-10 years before adopting new tech. That is why they mostly buy from established people like Borg. Being a small tech company that gets bought up into on of the large suppliers like Borg is a possible path but not all that likely.

I think in a traditional market, "hey we have this great tech we'd like to raise capital to operate as a B2B biz" would probably be fine.

In the crazy tech/EV/ZIRP VC-funded bubble, especially the final SPAC-it-rubes IPO cash-out phase... everyone was incentivized to raise way too much money as long as they pretended they'd be able to target and user market of billions. Sort of mutually agreed delusion.

I don't think in-wheel motors actually make that much sense. There is a reason almost nobody is perusing it. Its mostly pushed by start-ups who want to have some 'unique selling' points.

Their IP wont be worth all that much.

Honestly, it was pretty clear from the beginning they wouldn't make it. Starting a car company is insanely difficult. And they arrived right in the Wild West of free money and EV scams with a car that would be incredibly hard and incredibly expensive produce.

Without some absurd raises in money like Rivian or Lucid (Saudi money) you are simply not gone do it.

Aptera is also close to production. Several other, manufacturers are adding solar to their vehicles. Also, there are a few electrical campers with some solar panels. So, basically these things are coming to market.

And why not, it makes a lot of sense. Most cars don't drive most of the time. And if they are catching any light, you basically top up the battery a little bit for free.

Or put differently, that's energy you don't have to pay for. Yes, it adds some cost. And it saves you money. Kind of balances things out pretty quickly. And it adds some convenience for day to day use where you add enough power that you don't have to go to a charger so often. Especially for short commutes, this makes a lot of sense.

Dust is not a big deal. Indeed nothing a good old car wash can deal with. Or a bit of rain. Panel degradation happens very slowly otherwise. I don't think that's a huge concern.

Aptera is far more likely to go out of business than to be the next Tesla.

Right now in terms of likely to survive five years in EV land, you can rank Tesla>Rivian>Lucid>Fisker>Aptera>Lightyear .. and there's probably some other clowns I am forgetting. Like Lordstown, Nikola, Canoo, Faraday, Bollinger and Vinfast!

Vinfast has a higher chance of being alive in 5 years than Aptera. At least they've made a bunch of (pretty bad) cars.

Of the above list, if 3 of them beyond Tesla are still around on the other side of whatever recession is pending, and actually shipping cars in the 10k/year++ range, I'd be shocked.

I think Bollinger is already bust.

Rivian is dropping money like there is no tomorrow and they survive because they razed unimaginable amounts of money.

Tesla isn't even in that league anymore, they are more profitable then all other car companies (outside of Toyota). Its more likely some of those will bust (or merge) before Tesla will go bust.

That’s why I put Tesla at top of list. And frame it as which of the rest will survive. It’s baked in that Tesla will be fine.

That's a very apt typo: "razed" (burnt to the ground) for "raised" (collected funds)

I wish I was that clever and not just dyslexic.

Take it as a free win - and although I'm not dyslexic autocorrect works to portray me in a similar light, which of course I usually only notice after the edit window has closed.

I have a reservation on a Canoo. It’s the most interesting EV out there, I hope the Army, Walmart, and NASA contracts keep them afloat long enough to launch the lifestyle vehicle.

Consider carefully if you are rich enough to consider it like an "extra car", such that even if they survive due to those contracts.. you are willing to be a guineau pig for a car which may not have a service center within 200mi of your home for 2+ years, go out of business before your warranty expires, etc.

> Aptera is also close to production.

If I had a penny for every time one of the EV startups claimed this.

They go into production and then 1 year later they have like 20 produced and the year after that 100.

And then the often go bust.

Good ideas always start out small. Pennies are cheap and some of these ideas actually work out.

That happens. But you see a lot of good ideas being copied. I think there are already several bigger manufactures that have announced solar panels as an option. A bit gimmicky for some of them of course. But its an easy up-sell and they love up-selling.

Solar panels are widely used, widely understood to work, and the economics are trending to the point that you can slap them on just about everything. Like cars. Kind of obvious when you put it like that. Which is why that is a thing that is starting to happen in the car world right now. The couple of square meters of roof and hood provide a tempting target. You get maybe 2-3 kwh out of that on a nice day. That's 10-15 miles in an efficient EV. For most commuters, that would be very tempting and it might even be close to all they need on a daily basis. Meaning they'd be able to stretch their battery over weeks or months of use in between charging. Add grazing some free kwh at the supermarket or other places and it's perfect for people without the ability to charge at home.

> you basically top up the battery a little bit for free.

This is undeniably true. The catch is how very little that "little bit" actually is.

I have both a boat and a travel trailer powered with solar (I occasionally plug in the travel trailer but the boat is 100% solar-only). And I've been planning on adding solar to a truck camper. So I'm a big believer in power independence through solar and I'm fairly familiar with the pros (free electricity off the grid) and cons (so very little power). For my use cases it just about works, by being very frugal with consumption. But these are use cases where the typical consumption is in the tens of watts.

An EV uses tens of kilowatts to move itself. Three orders of magnitude more. Trying to run that off its own rooftop solar is akin to pouring a cup of water into Lake Mead to bring up the water level.

Lightyear zero is no longer in production: https://lightyear.one/articles/lightyear-decides-to-fully-fo...

And it seems like the whole company might be bankrupt.

> sophisticated series of controllers for its solar cell that can activate solar cells independently, therefore it's definitely no losing 50% of its power when 5% of the panel is in the shade

Aka just putting a single bypass diode on every cell, it's not complicated.

the lightyear 0 has a sophisticated series of controllers…

It was an extra $50 to get a controller for our RV solar that has that same functionality. MPPT solar chargers are hardly “sophisticated“ anymore.

Speaking of chiding others for doing homework, the Lightyear is no longer in production:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/23/lightyear-stops-production...

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