After a much-needed summer hiatus to recharge my batteries, Changing Lanes is back! I am looking forward to bringing you a variety of pieces this fall across a wide array of topics. I had hoped to also make a few exciting announcements, but these are not quite ready for prime time… keep watching this space for Big News to come!
I enjoy Mathew Growden’s newsletter The Change Optimist, which recently offered a history of solar-powered cars. Reading his work sent me down the rabbit hole of the subject, which led to today’s piece. Respect to Growdy for the inspiration!
There’s an old saw that intellectuals like to start with a premise no one can deny, and end with a conclusion that no one can accept. Solar cars are a great example of this kind of thinking in action.
Start with the premises we can all agree on. Firstly, most cars spend most of their time out of doors, so during the day sunlight is falling on them. Secondly, solar cells are cheap now, with prices having fallen, in USD, from $128.00 a watt in 1975 to about $0.26 in 2024 (a 99.8% decrease). Thirdly, electric cars are increasingly popular; this year, over a quarter of the cars sold worldwide will be electric. BloombergNEF projects that electric cars on the road will outnumber the internal-combustion ones by 2047… and market share will keep rising from there.
Therefore, electric cars should be solar cars. Make the roof of a car a solar panel, and have it charge the car battery. Owners would need to charge much less often, and perhaps never, if they lived in sunny places. The cost of charging would drop: not only the literal cost of money spent on electricity, but also the figurative cost, the chore of plugging in. That would be a win for the owner, but also for municipalities, employers, and everyone else that would otherwise have to shoulder the burden of arranging for charging infrastructure, and the electrical infrastructure (transformers, etc.) to support it.
It’s a vision to delight any futurist, but unfortunately, it’s too beautiful for this world. Solar panels on cars are much less productive of energy than solar panels anywhere else, and that’s for reasons that material science can’t fix. That means that solar panels on cars don’t pass cost-benefit analysis… and not only is that claim true today, but it will be true in the future as well. Solar panels don’t belong on cars, they belong on roofs, or in solar parks.
Or, of course, on trucks.
The Parking Problem
One reason I’m confident in this analysis is that we have three separate instances of solar car companies arriving with a bang and departing with a whimper.
Aptera launched in December 2020 touting a technology it called Never Charge (note the name). Co-founder Chris Anthony made it explicit: “With Aptera’s Never Charge technology, you are driven by the power of the sun.” By June 2026 Aptera still existed, but is now saying merely that solar can “meaningfully contribute to everyday transportation,” and that “To date, we have not commenced production of our SEVs [solar electric vehicles].”
Lightyear was founded in 2016 and promised a car that could go for months without charging, thanks to the 7,000 to 20,000 kilometres of free and effortless solar range it would collect each year. It went bankrupt in January 2023, having built only about a dozen cars, at a unit cost of €250,000 each. It would return in 2024 as a components supplier; in January 2026 it announced a partnership demonstration built with Nissan, claiming up to 23 kilometres of solar range a day.
Sono Motors was founded in 2016 with a mission to make “every vehicle solar.” Its Sion promised to add an average 112 kilometres of range a week from sunlight, to as much as 245 kilometres in favourable conditions. In February 2023, with 45,000 reservations for its solar car the Sion, it cancelled the product. Its pivot to retrofit kits proved unsuccessful and the firm ceased operations on 31 July 2026, with insolvency proceedings opening the following month. Post-mortems concluded that if there was any value here, it was in the technology, provided it was used to provide auxiliary power rather than direct vehicle propulsion.
So three companies (that I know of, there may be more) had the same vision of a solar-powered car. All failed. Now, that on its own is a small data point, since most new carmakers fail; RIP to Canoo, Arrival, Nikola and Lordstown Motors, all this decade. But I think there is a lesson to learn here beyond ‘making cars is a hard market to enter’, and that lesson is:
