Electric Lightyear One harnesses the sun to stretch its EV range
Cars
Know what you're thinking right CES 2020 and here's yet another electric car prototype but this one has a twist.
Meet the light year one, a fully electric vehicle that harnesses the power of the sun to enhance this reign.
Now a Lightyear One features a lightweight construction of aluminum and carbon fiber and a design that is aerodynamically influenced based on the solar racers of yesteryear.
It's got a very low and long design to help it better cut through the air.
In fact, even the undercarriage is smooth for better aerodynamics Now that long chassis gives you plenty of room on the roof and on the hood for solar cells.
In fact, the solar cells on the roof stretch all the way back to the rear bumper, giving you a grand total of five cubic meters of sun harvesting area.
Now, even the power of the sun isn't enough to total power this five-seater sedan on its own, and that's why there's a 60 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery pack underneath.
Plugging in a DC fast charging station is enough to add around 350 miles of range in just under an hour.
And you can also charge this thing at a level two station overnight.
With a full battery and the power of the sun at your back you're looking at a range of around 450 miles total.
Now that energy is gonna be put through four in wheel electric motors that have been developed in house by lightyear.
The automaker tells us that those motors give you an unprecedented amount of control with their torque vectoring and they save a little bit of weight which I'm still kinda wrapping my head around I always thought that four motors were heavier than one but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
That's possibly because these are smaller motors designed for more efficient driving.
0 to 60 happens at around eight or nine seconds so it's not exactly Ludacris speed but this is a much more efficient vehicle than perhaps a Tesla model X or a Porsche or [UNKNOWN].
The advantage of the solar panels were told by lightyear is that the average driver in a place that's funny like Las Vegas, where we're at right now can get around 10,000 miles of range just from the sun alone.
And that means that with regular charging at home and just parking your car outside where it gets around eight miles an hour from the sun, you may only need two quick charge.
Once or twice a year, and it does all of that with a cabin that looks like a regular car with really nice materials dashboard technology that we've come to know and love, like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
This really does look ready for production, but it's not quite yet.
We're still about a year out from them to start building these things in the Netherlands, where they're based.
The Dutch company expects that they're going to sell around 1000 of them in the first year starting in 2021.
For around 150,000 euro about $166,000.
us, you have to worry about the conversion just yet in the United States, because by the time they ramp up for production and get over here, they'll probably have reduced that price a little bit due to economies of scale.
Now we've seen a lot of cool cars at CES 2020.
But this is definitely one of the most unique and in my opinion probably one of the most interesting of the show.
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