Helmond-based Lightyear, a company that manufactures solar-powered cars, has temporarily halted production of its solar car. Instead, it will focus on producing solar roofs for car manufacturers through its subsidiary Lightyear Layer.
The announcement comes as the Dutch company has been unable to find new investors to further develop the solar car, Lightyear 2, since restarting from bankruptcy.
Pivoting business strategy
Talking about the abrupt shift in the company’s business strategy, Lex Hoefsloot, the CEO and Co-founder of Lightyear, tells Silicon Canals, “Over the past couple of months, we have noticed a significant rise in the demand for solar technology across the various industries. With Lightyear Layer we build record-breaking solar arrays that have the highest efficiency and are ready to be mass-produced and thoroughly tested in the harshest environment. We have been successfully talking to different parties for a while, and one of these parties is a big Asian OEM.”
“By taking these developments into account, as well as the lessons learned over the last few months, we have decided to further focus on our core technologies. We will focus on deploying integrated solar systems for cars at scale as these are closest to the market. For the other core technologies (e.g. the inwheel-motors) Lightyear continues to strengthen its collaboration and partnerships strategy to get highly efficient solar vehicles to market. We believe that this stronger focus and stepwise approach will be the fastest way to impact,” Hoefsloot tells Silicon Canals.