Hi. I've had many people ask me to investigate the claims of this, uh, solar-powered electric car. The Light Year which is, um, either it's been released or released shortly. Watch the world's global premiere of the World's first Solar Car.

The First solar power car. The Light Year Zero. Check it out, isn't it nice? It looks pretty funky and this is a question people ask all the time. Why don't Evs just have solar panels on the roof? And well, is it viable to actually power a practical everyday electric car via solar panels just on their roof? And the interesting thing is, I actually drive a solar powered car.

so I can tell you and we can run the numbers on this one. So some of the claims are: drive for months without charging charges itself. Whenever roof absorbs the light, charging becomes a journey, not a destination. Well, I suspect that the journey is going to be parking this thing instead of driving it.

Positive change for the planet, blah blah blah. charges anywhere and takes you everywhere regardless of electrical infrastructure. Our cars are built for grid independence. built for grid independence.

So from all this, they're starting to sort of imply that you know under certain circumstances this car will just like charge itself all the time. Or at least they're giving you the impression that you'll get a lot of extra range out of this thing. In fact, they tell you here. a thousand kilometer range between plug-in charging moments.

We have a new industry term charging moments. What does that mean? Driving range will vary depending on driving habits, location, and season. A Thousand kilometer range based on 50 kilometer daily commute in Amsterdam during summer, the Netherlands, the nether regions. So hey, you've got to be driving this car during summer time with peak, uh, solar irradiance.

B You've got to only drive 50 kilometers a day. Uh, in order to get this like a thousand kilometer range stuff, And uh, see, you've got to have absolutely perfect skies with no obstacles, no trees, no buildings, no lampposts casting shadows across your solar panels. Because they, they don't tell you how any of these solar panels work with shading at all. There's no data on that whatsoever, so you got to assume that you know if you get any sort of shading over these things, the performance is going to drop fairly drastically and you'll notice it's got solar panels on the bonnet here, on the roof and on the boot here.

And of course, if the sun's over here like this, um, the bonnet is going to be shadowed by the rest of the car. And likewise, if the sun's over here, this back part is going to be practic get practically zero out of it. So this is a totally non-optimal shape. but we've got enough data here.

We can do real world calculations with five square meters of patented double curved solar array panels. freedom to move anywhere. it's built like no other electric car charging on the go and gaining up to 70 kilometers of range per day from the sun alone. So that is one of their banner specifications.

We can test this. Our solar cells can add up to 70 kilometers of driving range per day directly from the sun. Now for those who don't know, I actually drive a fully solar powered car or at least I try to. I have a 20, 20 Hyundai Ioniq electric car which by the way has the same or better uh efficiency in terms of uh, kilowatt hours per hundred kilometers than this, uh, light year.

But I installed a My Energy Zappy here which is a Uh Solar Ev charger tracker. You can get other brands on the market as well. I'll link in the video now. I've got an eight kilowatt solar array on my Uh roof and uh, any excess energy from that solar array minus anything my house takes, you can see that it puts that energy into uh, the car during the day.

So we actually have an ideal lifestyle for a a solar-powered car like this. We have a huge solar array on the roof, we've got a solar tracking Ev charger like this, and we just we can just leave the car there plugged in during the day, which we do. and then if the sun comes out, we can, uh, suck any excess energy from the solar that our house isn't taking and pump it in car. You can see that we're pumping in 6.1 kilowatts here and it yes, it does drop drastically in winter and we'll look at the data on that and you can see that we're pulling no energy from the grid at all.

So yeah, I actually already drive a fully solar-powered electric car. Or at least I try to. Now here's the thing. Even with an eight kilowatt solar array.

Eight kilowatts, which is an order of magnitude larger. Well, actually, technically eight times the surface area of the five square meters. Here, I've got 40 square meter, uh, solar array on my roof. We've got the specifications here, but we actually, uh, have a similar scenario to this.

We actually only drive about 25 to 30 kilometers per day. Um, on average, we can. You know if we've got extra tasks we can. uh, we use a bit there.

we use a bit more extra on the weekend, but they actually base their data on a 50 kilometer work day commute in Amsterdam in summer time, and a 35 kilometer workday commute in southern Southern Spain in spring and summer. So we actually already drive a solar power car like this with the same efficiency as this light year car. Which is, by the way. Uh, it's got a 60 kilowatt hour battery pack 625 kilometer uh, range.

Like this, a nominal uh range. Then it's about 10.5 uh, kilowatt hours per 100 kilometers. My Ionic can actually get as low as 10. Uh, just around town like this.

And if you don't know, Evs are actually, uh, best in stop start, uh, traffic. They're actually not very efficient at all if you drive them long distances down the motorway at high speed. Um, so which is why this 625 kilometer range? Well, they claim it drops to 560. that's pretty good, but this has a better drag coefficient.

This has a 0.19 drag coefficient compared to my 2020 Ionic, which has 0.24 but I've measured it and the efficiency drops fairly drastically. Like 25 loss in range if you're just hauling it down the highway all day. So as somebody who already drives a solar power car basically equivalent, uh, to this inefficiency, using uh, the same like a daily routine that they're uh targeting here in their marketing campaign, we can't actually do a hundred percent solar power because shock horror, the sun doesn't come out all the time, even here in Sydney, Australia with an array that is eight times the surface area of this one. Eight times, and we find that we probably can get away with eighty, maybe ninety percent uh of our usage coming from solar.

Other times, we just have to charge it from the grid because you might have had like a spate of bad weather. Sometimes we can go an entire week without getting much if any usable energy at all from the thing. Sure, this might be a bit better because ours trips out at 1.2 kilowatts. It won't let us charge under that, but this one might be better.

A little bit better in that regard. But no. Remember, mine's eight times the surface area of the solar array of this one. And I'm telling you, as a solar power car owner, I can't drive a 100 solar-powered Ev even with eight times the surface area.

So I can tell you right off the bat, no solar-powered electric cars are not viable at best. They're a supplemental uh technology and it's very nice. I think all solar. You know Ev should have like built-in solar panels like this, but it's going to cost a lot extra.

How much extra? Oh boy. All right, let's order one of these light years Zeros. We don't want regular silver like this. Now look at this with the Ev blog.

We want matte metallic copper for an extra 5 000 Euros. But look at this. 255 000 Euros. This is a quarter of a million Euros for this thing.

This would want to be one luxury ass car. Let me tell you, for a quarter of a million euros, This is insane. Obvious. Oh well, it does have a vegan interior, so you know.

Anyway, No, obviously, obviously you are paying for. uh, well. not only that, they're like a startup. they don't make many of these.

Uh, to be fair, but still. really. you're paying for the wake factor of being able to tell your friends that you drive a solar-powered electric car and check it out. We can get the Aero cover on the back as well.

It gives you an ad an extra 12 kilometers free range per battery charge. Um, yeah, that's less than two percent extra range. Like old school Evs like they have. These aero covers.

Kind of looks like futuristic, you know. But anyway, you are paying for the fact that this thing is solar powered. So how much solar panel does this thing got? Well, I'm glad you asked. We know it's five square meters we can actually get.

Let's go to the data sheet of sort of like highest output, uh, residential panels on the market. It's a 400 watt Jobby here. 22.6 Uh. efficient.

It's a 400 watt panel that will be at a thousand watts per square meter. solar irradiance. And yep, here it is down here: 1000 watts per square meter irradiance. That's the standard here.

We can get slightly better than that here in Sydney during summer time, but as I'll show you in a minute, the output drops like it can have in the middle of winter, it's not great. Turns out to have a square meter of 1.76 so we can factor that for 400 and that gives us 1185 watts for this light year. That's absolute maximum solar output from this under ideal conditions. not counting.

You know the shape of the thing like you're never gonna get this. Okay, it's more likely to be like one kilowatt, uh, maximum solar output of this thing and it's not going to be as efficient as, uh, one of these things. Because trust me, if it was, If if that was the reason that this thing's so expensive that it uses the world's most efficient solar panels, they'd be bragging about it until the cows come home. But their marketing doesn't, so you know it's probably not even going to be as efficient as a regular residential panel.

But a good ballpark engineering assumption for this back of the envelope stuff. right? If you're not knocking off at least 25 just based on the shape of the car, then you're not even in the game like it's going to help. But with five square meters of solar panel, like, you're not even going to get close to this sort of stuff. Trust me, I drive a solar power car in Sydney under ideal with a huge solar array and I still can't do it.

I've got to classify this as a helpful gimmick, but I don't. You know it's not worth a quarter of a million bucks helpful. So let's do it for winter time here. Uh, in Ju which is June Here in Australia, the gold here is my production.

so you assuming you leave the car there for the entire day. Okay, and we're even going to be incredibly generous and totally ignore the shape of this thing. So any losses due to the shape, we're just going to assume it's as good as the solar array on my roof. which it won't be.

But if we can bust it with absolutely perfect assumptions, then in practice it's going to even be more busted. So we need to scale this down to the light year because it's eight times smaller. We did that based on the uh, square area. I've got about 40 square meters of solar panels on my roof, whereas the light year one is only five square meters.

Once again, I think it's actually less than that because of the shape of the car and everything else. right? There's losses there. It's simply if you've got a shape like that, if you've got sun coming from here, you're not getting much over here and vice versa, right? So divide 20 by eight. That's two and a half kilowatt hours per day.

So divide that. 2.5 kilowatt hours, Uh, divided by uh, the efficiency. 10.5 kilowatt hours per 100 kilometers. You get an answer of 23.8 kilometers extra range per day.

23 kilometers per day. That's nowhere near the 70 that they claim. But this is winter time. Let's do summer.

now. It's actually hard to get a figure for January. It's all over the shop because we had really bad weather earlier this year. But look, you can see that it peaks around 40 kilowatt hours produced.

so I'm going to run with 40. once again, we're going to take absolute best case figures. There's no cloud whatsoever, but you can see how like a cloudy day can easily harvest well, more than half it, right? We're down like 14 kilowatt hours instead of 40. But we'll run with 40.

this ain't looking good for light years claims. Let me tell you, 40 kilowatt hours? Uh, per day? Uh, scale it down to the size of the light year. So divided by that eight. That gives us five kilowatt hours.

Uh, per day. And if you divide that by the 10.5 kilowatt hours per hundred kilometers, you're only getting 47 kilometers a day extra for this magical solar power car. which they claim our solar cells can add up to 70 kilometers of driving range per day directly from the sun. No, it won't.

I don't know where they're getting that figure from unless they're using much more efficient cells. Then you know the best ones that you can get for your residential roof that we looked at there. There's no way that you can say that a solar panel that's shaped like this car is is better than my rooftop. You know I don't have an ideal angle, but at least it's like angled like towards the sun.

It's a like it's a proper residential solar array. If I had this thing in my driveway and there was no shading at all, it was absolutely perfect. Um, I know I'd only get even in summertime here in Sydney, Australia. We're famous for our sun.

On a good day, we'd still only get an extra range of 47 kilowatt hours. That doesn't include any losses. That's assuming that you know this is absolutely like as good as a residential rooftop array. which is not that, uh, 70 kilometer range claim.

No, don't believe it at all. But having said that, if you actually do only do 20, 30 K's a day, something like that, and you have perfect conditions, then this thing might be able to pair itself for a significantly long time. It's a nice supplemental technology, but no. Like, I wouldn't be quibbling over this if it wasn't a quarter of a million Euros and hyped up put on the pedestal as this, um, you know, solar-powered Ev Like They try to be realistic in their claims here by only saying up to 70 K's and stuff like that, extra range and a thousand kilometers with plug-in charging moments and stuff like this.

But no, no, clearly they're You know they're marketing this to people thinking that they're going to get huge amount of extra range because it's solar and you're not the best you're going to get out of this. I reckon it's it's going to be under. It's going to be significantly under 50 kilometers of range per day. That's ideal conditions.

And as somebody who drives a solar powered Ev in practice, I can tell you yeah, there's not as much sun as you think. and if you don't believe me, the 2022 The first perfect day I found was 20th of March. I'm here in Sydney, Australia. Sure, we've had a bad run of weather uh, lately, which hasn't been terrific.

But here's a time lapse. So watch the scale over here. It's going to change Here you go. We've got look right? So this is actually going backwards, uh, in time from today's date when I'm uh, recording this.

And yeah, you might get the occasional perfect days where you'll get the perfect, uh, curve like this. But like most days, you're going to get some sort of, you know, shading. Clouds are going to come in and out and all sorts of stuff. And like, this is under ideal conditions with the solar panels on my rooftop, right? This is not your car.

You're driving around everywhere, You're driving past buildings and trees and all sorts of things. Um, come on, right? No, you're never going to get these perfect figures which they base their you know, 70 kilometers extra per day on. These are just Bs marketing numbers. Check this out.

I just realized that we actually have enough data in their marketing numbers on this claim here that we can actually work out the efficiency of their solar panels at best. Remember, these are marketed numbers. They're always going to be the absolute best. And then you've got the main claim here.

Drive for months without charging. I mean, you know that's the banner claim It's like, yeah, no, solar power cars are not going to be a thing. No, this thing's not going to be revolutionary. In practice, you're going to find that it's meh.

It's kind of nice to know that you're charging it during the day, but if you've got a house like mine with solar power, you're better off just installing a like, a Zappy or equivalent thing like I've got, and then powering it from excess solar during the day. Or simply, um, you know, if you're at a company, they should install huge solar panels over the parking lots and then everyone can just plug in. You know, your regular charger and boom. You know, um, you, you get free power That way.

That'd be absolutely fantastic. But putting five square meters of solar panel on the non-optimal Oh wait, where they even the car shades itself like no. Come on. And that's my conclusion for the light year one, the world's first solar powered production car.

Like looks like it's gonna come out. It's sexy. People will buy it because people have got money. You know, a quarter of a million Euros.

Good on you. But uh, yeah, nah. So there's two questions here. Are solar-powered electric cars like a viable thing? Can you actually do? They give you any decent increase in range, Or can you would potentially use them as solar power Only from someone who owns one with an eight times bigger solar panel? No, not really.

These are, as I said, supplemental only uh, technology. and it's very nice. I think every Ev should actually have uh, solar panels integrated like this. You know, bar in the integration, uh, cost, and stuff like that.

Look, you can only get five square meters. You can't do it. You cannot beat the laws of physics, Captain. Okay, you're not gonna suddenly.

Even if you had double or triple the amount of efficiency in your solar cells, you're still not there. I am eight times the size of this, and I I still can't get 100 solar usage. So no solar powered cars are not viable. It's just supplemental tech.

As for this, uh, light year one? Um, it's claims are yeah. typical marketing wankery and you're not gonna get this 70 kilometers per day. You're not going to get that in practice, it's just not going to happen. And even if you did, it's not a huge amount anyway.

So like, uh, no, so no, it's just marketing, marketing marketing. It's a very nice car. But come on. the price of this thing.

They are really taking the piss at 260 and 7 000 us dollars. And uh, by the way, thanks to one of my viewers, uh, Bob C, he mentioned the uh, Aptera um here and I will do an extended uh version of this video by the way on my second channel and on my Odyssey channel as well. It'll have some extra technical detail on the light year and also a quick overview of this Aptera. but this is one tenth the price of the light year.

This is from 26 000. And the efficiency of this thing is not a huge amount greater. It's only 40 percent better than my Hyundai Ioniq. But even with this whiz-bang tech here, Um, yeah, you're still not going to be driving around in a solar powered car all day, every day.

And as for uh, integrating the cost of solar panels into something like this? Well, you know I can imagine that. Yeah, it does actually cost a lot, but you know, the 260 000? They're just taking the piece. So yes, you might start seeing more. Um, solar panel integration? Uh, just for really marketing.

Um, and it's just nice to be able to think that you're getting. you know, a lot of extra range. but in practice, no, it's just a supplemental kind of stuff. It's a shame, but you know, can a bit laws of physics Captain? Yeah, nah, it's my official verdict.

Anyway, leave your thoughts and comments down below. Catch you next time you.