Lightyear continues to dream of a solar car, but now focuses only on solar roofs

2023-10-04 09:40:04

Will Lightyear ever have that dreamed solar-powered car roll off the assembly line? It is highly uncertain. For the time being, the Helmond manufacturer is working on a much less ambitious plan: the production of sunroofs for cars. It is also not certain whether it will work. But we see ‘growing interest’ in the solar panel side, says Lightyear CEO Lex Hoefsloot Financial Daily.

An electric car with not batteries, but with solar cells as the main energy source, that was Lightyear’s dream, which emerged in 2016 from a student project at TU Eindhoven. Last autumn the company started production of its first model, the LY 0, but in January this year it suddenly went bankrupt.

This bankruptcy was a surprise to the outside world, because less than a week earlier, Lightyear had announced that it had already received 20,000 orders for its new model, the LY 2. That seemed like an important step, because the LY 0 would become far too expensive to sell on a large scale. This should be possible with the LY 2 (target price 40,000 euros).

A new major lender has not been found

So things won’t get to that point, at least not in the foreseeable future. Lightyear had raised more than 200 million euros in investment money in recent years and that money was almost gone in January – not strange for a company with no income, but with 650 employees.

A new start was made in April thanks to a group of investors who contributed another 8 million euros. The intention was to use that money to continue working on making the LY 2 ready for production. But it will take at least three years before the LY 2 can be brought onto the market, so a new, major lender had to be found quickly in the meantime.

That did not work, it now appears. “The automotive sector is showing increasing interest in energy from solar cells,” Hoefsloot explains FD. “But the thinking is still at an early stage.” The economic tide is also not good: interest rates on the capital market have risen sharply over the course of this year, making investors cautious about investing in risky start-ups such as Lightyear.

A logical step

And so Lightyear is now taking a different tack. Hoefsloot has not completely put the production of solar cars out of his mind, he says, but the emphasis is now fully on subsidiary Lightyear Layer, which is to produce solar roofs. This will happen in a factory in Venray with a capacity of 100,000 roofs per year. Of the 650 jobs at the beginning of this year, there are now 90 left, and some of these will also have to disappear.

Solar roof production will also be quite a job. Lightyear has entered into a letter of intent with a supplier in the automotive industry and is ‘in discussions’ with car manufacturers – names are not mentioned. But the 8 million from the restart will eventually run out, and it will take at least a few years before enough is earned from the new factory to cover the expenses. So new money is needed.

Yet this is a logical step, says Rico Luman, who works in the automotive sector at ING. “It is extremely difficult and expensive to get a solar car into production,” he says. This is different for sunroofs. “Lightyear has the innovative knowledge required for this, and there is certainly demand for it in the market. I can well imagine that investors can be found for this.”