The Bavarian startup Sono Motors announced on Friday that it is abandoning its solar panel car project.
The self-charging solar-powered “Sion” car, which should have been on European roads by 2024, will ultimately not see the light of day, carmaker Sono Motors said in a statement on Friday.
“Sono Motors is committed to focusing exclusively on the solar business for B2B customers and has ended the Sion passenger car program,” said the start-up, which is abandoning its project, which has been running since 2022.
Electric cars equipped with solar panels
Sono Motors planned to build a fleet of black-bodied family cars covered with 456 photovoltaic cells to provide additional range. The company claimed a range of 305 kilometers for each car, thanks to an electric battery, as well as an additional range of 112 kilometers on average per week thanks to solar energy.
Sono Motors will ultimately focus solely on integrating its solar technology on third-party vehicles. Its customers include Mitsubishi Europe, Chereau and two Volkswagen subsidiaries.
The decision was prompted by “the continuing instability of the financial markets”, explained Laurin Hahn, CEO of Sono Motors, while the bulk of its expenditure concerns the Sion program. The Munich start-up will resell the program, and thus lay off 300 employees.
Reimburse future customers
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, this supplier of solar mobility solutions, including solar panels for bodywork, says it has 23 customers in the transport industry and employs 418 people worldwide, 70% of whom are engineers.
“It was a difficult decision and despite more than 45,000 reservations and pre-orders for Sion, we were forced to react to the continued instability in the financial markets and to rationalize our activities,” said Laurin Hahn.
Half of the customers who had reserved their Sion had already paid an average deposit of 2225 euros, which was to finance the development of the model. To compensate them, Sono Motors announced a repayment plan in “several installments”, as well as a “bonus” paid out “over the next two years”. The final price of the car was to amount to 25,000 euros.
The young brand planned to produce more than 250,000 over the next 6 years. This failure, despite financial aid from the European Union, illustrates the difficulties of this sector of the automotive industry to emerge.
