we actually offer a lot more. for one, we re leveraging the battery to provide electricity for customers, particularly in roll out, in electrical outage situations, we can actually use it for our home, for multiple days at a time. also without the engine, we re able to take advantage of that space up front and basically turn it into a front trunk. and then, of course, performance in the vehicle isjust outstanding. with an ev, you get that near instant torque that we talked about earlier which gets you up to 0 60mp in mid four seconds. i mean, it s fast, so. we ve got a question from gilbert in lebanon now, coming in from the video link. if you can unmute your microphone and give us your question. my question is, why - was the lightyear 0 released so late when it was - expected much earlier? so, thorny question there for arjo. why was the lightyear so late?
it will certainly be - a multi yearjourney, but i would very much hope and expect strongly that. by the end of this decade, we will be seeing this- in very mainstream use. end of this decade, i will come find you and find out. arjo, what s your perspective on this? so, i m going to go back to the mission statement of lightyear again, clean mobility for everyone. we talked a bit about the cost of ownership of a car that you buy and the biggest factor we know of is the purchase price, and i think that is where autonomous driving is really going to help. because the key to getting the cost down is sharing, making sure that we use the car with a lot more people, cause it s standing still 90% of the time, and the key to making sharing convenient, i think that s where autonomous driving comes in, by making sure the car acts like an uber without a driver, that you call and and within two minutes, it s in front of the door and you go there. if you want to bring your drywall panels, an f 150 p
so we took a year to design and build stella, the world s first solar powered family car and raced it 3,000 kilometres through the desert of australia, and that set us up for the next adventure, for lightyear, so a few years later after we finished our studies and we took the car all over the world and we had hoped to inspire the industry, to show that it is possible to build a car that drives only on the power of the sun and is efficient and lightweight, but it din t really happen so at some point we figured if we want to get this to the market, we will have to do it ourselves and that is when we founded lightyear, six years ago. and in this race that you took part in at the start of all of this, you re racing across the australian desert in a solar powered car. this is not vehiclesjust creeping along the desert for weeks on end is it? how fast do they go? 3,000 kilometres in about 5.5 days, average speed of 70 kilometres an hour, top speed around, it depends a bit
The world's first long-range production-ready solar electric vehicle (EV), "Lightyear 0," is being tested before mass production begins this fall, news agency AFP reported.
The test has been conducted under northern Spain's blistering sun. As per the startup, an exclusive run of 946 cars will go into production and reach their drivers in November.
On June 23, the company posted on Twitter: Motoring history looks bright as we welcome guests to the first-ever driving experience of Lightyear 0".