in the netherlands, which is like a 5% versus countries in the world in terms of solar irradiance, you get up to 7,000 kilometers per year. so more than half of the energy that the car needs for an average driver actually comes from the sun. thank you so much, arjo. so jamie, autonomous cars. i can imagine them being great in sort of north american cities with grid like structures set out like chess boards. here in london, less so. yeah, you re absolutely right. there s a huge challenge - to solving autonomous driving in the the kinds of unstructured, complex, busy environments - that we have here in london- and in many cities across the world. indeed, the traditional technology stack sort of uses three, - three main pillars. one is mapping. so for these systems to work, - you send vehicles much like google, sends vehicles around the streets to to map out streetview - images so we can navigate ourselves. but for a vehicle autonomous vehicles, this needs - to be done at a much, | much h
is you re from the netherlands, arjo. it s lovely when the sun is shining, when it s not all, it s pretty cloudy out there. what sort of range on average, can i expect out of your vehicle in in northern europe? it s an electric car. you can still charge it. so if you want to drive at night, it has a battery and you can drive 625 kilometresjust on the, on the battery. and then the solar panel continuously trickle charges this battery. and on a single day, if you re in the in the full sun and in a in a good place, you may add up to 70 kilometers of range from the sun. and that doesn t sound like a lot compared to the 625. but in practice, we don t use our car every day and we don t use it every day for very long trips while the solar system is always on. so the way to to look at it is how much do you get in a year? so in one year, even
land code those rules in by hand. i thank you so much, jamie. now, arjo, we re going to come to you and 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 size solar car? so it s a very fair question, right? we were founded with a mission to provide clean mobility for everyone. and obviously, the lightyear zero that we re selling now for 250,000 euros is clearly not for everyone. and the way to view this is this first car is really a technology demonstrator. we re building it in a very limited series. and this is also the main reason why this first car is so expensive. so the key is in scaling up, and that s what we plan on. 0n the road map for 2025, we plan to launch the lightyear two with similar specs in terms
and electric vehicles and ai and even touching on the first ai strike, i think, even touching on the first ai strike, ithink, on even touching on the first ai strike, i think, on behalf of the bbc world service, whether you are joining us on the internet, round the world with this in this fabulous information age gallery, please join me in giving a warm round of applause to our brilliant pioneering engineers, jamie shotton, arjo and linda.
i want to move on now to arjo. arjo, you work in engineering solar cars and again, no less ground breaking here. i just want to talk about how you got drawn into that as the thing that you wanted to do. i understand that there is something called the solar vehicle race across australia. tell me about that and tell me about why you got into this field. yeah, actually, back in 2012, um, we were studying at the, uh, uh, technical university in, in eindhoven and we founded this, uh, this, this solar carteam to participate in the world solar challenge. but for the first time in 2013, when we competed for the first time was the first time they introduced a new class for vehicles that not just have to arrive from darwin to adelaide as fast as they can, but that were also scored on how many people you take, how practical the car is, and how much external energy you actually still need from the grid. so we took a year to design and build stella, the world s first solar powered family car, and r