In front of de Volkskrant reporter Bard van de Weijer closely follows the development of the solar car. Rightly so, we may be witnessing the beginning of a new and spectacular chapter in Dutch industrial history: the birth of a car manufacturer, manufacturer of the Lightyear invested with solar panels; possibly the Dutch Tesla, with which you will soon be grinning at 160 per hour on the A2 – provided the sun shines a bit.
Van de Weijer had traveled to Uusikaupunki in Finland, where the Lightyear is currently being built. The first was half finished when the reporter walked into the factory hall. The mechanics, Van de Weijer noticed, walked around it a bit ‘unfamiliar’. No wonder, the Lightyear is a miracle that defies imagination. For example, the motors are incorporated in the rims. When the sun shines brightly, you can drive it 1,000 kilometers to Geneva, without having to use a charging station along the way.
I am astonished. It is a story you would expect in Silicon Valley or Guangdong, but not in Helmond, where Lightyear is located. It’s un-Dutch, we sell cheese and tomatoes, but not advanced solar cars. Okay, we have ASML, but that’s also more luck than wisdom. Should it be a success with the Lightyear, I expect Volkswagen to take over our car factory ruthlessly – I just don’t have the self-confidence that comes with a car-producing nation, DAF has destroyed a lot.
I first heard about solar cars through the World Solar Challenge. That turned out to be a biennial race in Australia, over a distance of more than 3,000 kilometers, from Darwin to Adelaide. The battle was between teams from technical universities. Typical nerds, who spent two years tinkering with solar panels on a soapbox and with them made their way through the endlessly sunny Australian outback, commented on TV by Herman van der Zandt, who had already put forward his candidacy for the Top 2000 a gogo.
TU Delft usually won, with a car called Nuna. In 2013, a ‘cruiser’ class was added to the competition, which was won by the Solar Team Eindhoven (STE) of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Their car was called Stella. They won again two years later and again in 2017 and 2019. The first team captain of the STE was Lex Hoefsloot, now the CEO of Lightyear, which was founded in 2016.
Lightyear refers to the distance that light travels in a year, which also happens to be the total distance that humans cover each year with cars, airplanes and other motorized transport. Lightyear wants all the energy required for this to come from the sun before 2035, the source that sends as much energy to the earth every hour as the annual consumption of all mankind.
I predict that will not work, but you have to dare to dream big.
According to Hoefsloot, when the project started, Lightyear wondered why no one else had come up with the idea of a commercial solar car. That is exactly the secret of any breakthrough. Everyone believed it couldn’t be done, a self-charging car for the mass market, except for a few crazies. However, it has not yet been proven that it is possible. Production of the Lightyear 2, the first serially built family car powered by solar panels, is expected to start in two years’ time.
Part of the car manufacturer’s start-up capital comes from SHV, from the Fentener van Vlissingen family. SHV used to stand for the Steenkolen Handels-Vereeniging.