they are going to say, we re replacing a taxidriver, a taxidriver costs x cents per kilometre, so we take 10% off and we can make a hell of a lot of money because we need to earn back the $100 billion we invested, so until we get that cost down, really, to what it actually costs to operate, plus a small margin, then i think we will start to see this autonomous mobility on demand really being a lot cheaper than owning a car, and a big switch. and that should enable our mission again, if we make sure those cars are electric or running on solar. thank you, arjo. now, linda, of course, electrical vehicles in general help with emissions and help even more when they re powered with electricity from renewable resources. all this is great, but the batteries are a problem, aren t they? they contain a lot of rare earth metals that need to be mined at scale. for example, lithium is a key component and you can get that out of mines say, for example, in chile s atacama desert. is there a plan in pl
i would liken it to the - transition between the horse and cart and the automobile 100 or years ago or so, right? - it happened pretty quicklyl in the grand scale of things but, incrementally, day on day, it was sort of a gradual - process but accelerated - as the economics and the safety and all the other things that came with such a transitionl came to bear. 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 th
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? so, we set out to build this production car six years ago when we founded the company but we were five guys straight out of college. we didn t have any money, we didn t have any experience so besides having to engineer the car, we also had to build the company, and we ve been trying to do the engineering of the vehicle and building the company at the same time in a way that we are set up for success for the future, so we weren tjust engineering a car, we were also engineering all the processes and all the systems behind it on how
we believe it is much more scalable, so to avoid the need for maps, we will avoid the use of very expensive sensors and rely. on cameras, which are easy, . relatively inexpensive and easy to integrate and, you know, we drive with these two - eyes every day. finally, we re going to use . a more holistic, what we call end to end, machine learning| approach where we really teach the machine to drive by example rather than trying to code - those rules in by hand. thank you so much, jamie. now, arjo, we re going to come to you and you ve made such great strides with your prototype model of the lightyear solar car. it s expensive. what i really want to know is when am i going to be able to afford one? when are we going to get to a commercially viable, affordable, family sized solar car? so, it s a very fair question, right? we were founded with the mission to provide clean mobility for everyone, and obviously the lightyear
all the same things that current truck customers can do. moving on from that point, what i want to know, arjo, the netherlands is lovely when the sun is shining. when it is cloudy out there, what sort of range on average can i expect out of your vehicle in northern europe? it s an electric car. you can still charge it so you want to drive at night it has a battery and you can drive yourself 625 kilometres just on the battery and the solar panel continuously trickle charges the battery and on a single day if you are in full sun and in a good place you may add up to 70 kilometres of range from the sun that does not sound like a lot compared to the 625 but in practice we don t use our car every day we don t use it every day for very long trips, while the solar system is always on so the way to look