The German solar car has failed and with it the dream of a “better” electric car

The solar car project Sion has failed. The Munich start-up Sono Motors had unsuccessfully campaigned for 100 million euros for the construction of a pre-series from interested parties and investors and drew a line on Friday: the program would be stopped with immediate effect, about 300 employees would be laid off.

“Despite more than 45,000 reservations and pre-orders for the Sion, we were forced to respond to the continued instability of the financial markets,” said company founder Laurin Hahn. Car buyers would have to get their down payments back in installments over the next two years.

The Sion was a car full of bright ideas that even the big manufacturers would be good at – and that earned Sono a lot of sympathy.

That starts with the body of the Sion: it is equipped with hundreds of solar cells. This means that the compact electric car must be able to drive an average of 112 kilometers per week. With extra power from the socket and a battery, the range would have been more than 300 kilometers.

At about 4.30 meters, the Sono would have been about the size of a VW Golf – but with plenty of room inside. A tablet must control all functions in the interior – just like in a Tesla. And: Sono promised low repair costs and would have been quite unrivaled in this regard.

In the end, however, there was an urgent lack of fresh money to build the pre-series in 2023 and the first series of cars in Finland in early 2024.

From now on, Sono wants to concentrate on solar roofs for buses and trucks. This business is less capital intensive and already generating income. Sono’s main shareholders are its founders and US investors.

(t online)