Lightyear, a startup identified for growing an costly photo voltaic automobile, introduced its second automobile, and it’s going to be a a lot inexpensive ~$34,000 photo voltaic electrical automobile.
Lightyear first caught our consideration as a result of it spun out of Photo voltaic Workforce Eindhoven, a bunch of engineering college students from the Technical College of Eindhoven (Netherlands) who’ve been competing within the World Photo voltaic Problem with their Stella and Stella Lux, power constructive photo voltaic automobiles – that means that they will produce extra power than they devour.
After a profitable competitors, the scholar engineers created Lightyear to attempt to commercialize their photo voltaic electrical automobile.
Again in 2019, they unveiled the Lightyear One, an electrical sedan with built-in photo voltaic cells that assist push the vary to 450 miles (725 km) based mostly on the WLTP cycle.
The Lightyear One, like most first autos from a producer, is just not low cost. The corporate beforehand introduced a beginning value of €149,000 together with VAT ($170,000 USD).
Earlier this yr, the startup secured $110 million in funding to convey the automobile to market subsequent yr.
This week, the corporate introduced a cope with LeasePlan, a Automobile-as-a-Service firm, to “reserve 5,000 automobiles of Lightyear’s second mannequin, which is scheduled to enter manufacturing by 2024/2025.”
Lightyear didn’t launch many particulars about this new automobile to come back after the Lightyear One, but it surely confirmed that it plans to launch it in Europe and North America, and it ought to begin at round €30,000 (the equal of $33,779) through Carscoops.
The aim is to make use of the information acquired constructing the costly and low-volume manufacturing Lightyear One to develop the higher-volume manufacturing and less-expensive photo voltaic automobile, which is dubbed Lightyear Two.
The corporate didn’t elaborate on the shape issue, but it surely’s clear that Lightyear’s focus is on extremely aerodynamic and environment friendly designs with embedded photo voltaic cells to push the vary much more.
Extra particulars are anticipated to come back subsequent yr, however for now, the corporate is concentrated on the Lightyear One.
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