Lightyear Keynote Presentation — Strategic Roadmap & Product Vision

welcome welcome to the session so let me start with a small anecdote because everyone in leicester has their own why their own story of why they're so committed to our mission my personal story goes back to the summers i spend in the alps because if you go up the mountains and then you look at all those forests and the glaciers and the mountain peaks as far as your eyes can reach then reading about some of those things actually disappearing some of those glaciers disappearing really feels unimaginable how on earth can something so big and so vast disappear because of us humans and the irony of course is that the one thing the single thing that brought me there the car is actually partly the reason of why it's disappearing so the question became how do we preserve what we have but at the same time give our kids the possibility to actually go there and enjoy it clearly we need 100 clean cars and there's about 1 billion of them and all of them have to become clean and there's another 1 billion coming in the next 20 years and all those cars need to be clean as well and think about it behind every single one of those cars there's an owner that relies on it every day so why do we believe as an industry that we can give them a car that requires them to change their habits and that's even more expensive anyone should be able to switch tomorrow without needing to change the habits or change their life it's not just the early adopters we need we need literally everyone to drive an electric car it's just one percent today so we're not at that point yet how do we scale electric cars because in the end we need two billion of them so if you go back to the basics of how an innovation becomes successful how it spreads then there's amongst others two very important points so one is that it needs to be compatible with the lifestyles of people today and the second is that the product should have a very clear distinctive advantage compared to the other products that are being used today let's start with compatibility because it has to be compatible with the lives that people are living today and in order to make electric cars convenient you need about one charger per car at the moment we have about seven million chargers and of course we'll need about one billion to make it convenient and then the second question is where do we get the energy the energy that you might get from the solar panels of your house you actually need for your house so the energy has to come from somewhere else and it needs to come from the grid and on the grid there's going to be five times more demand during the evening peak when you start cooking you start your heating you charge your electric car and the grid currently cannot cope with that so it means that we will need to reinforce the grid as well and then the energy that's growing into the grid is still mostly powered by fossil fuel energy so mostly coal and gas power plants we need to replace those as well so all of this change will have to come in every country all these steps will have to happen so how realistic is it that we'll get there as soon as possible and with all this uncertainty whether the change will really come there's one constant and it's the sun it's right above it it will be there for billions of years and we can use it every day to charge our cars because in the end people don't really want chargers they want a full battery so why don't we use the sun directly to charge our batteries every day and talking about those chargers which we for sure will need in the coming few years a huge investment is attached to that if we just look at europe we need about 80 billion euros to deploy all those chargers and to get to scale and if we would make the transition to solar mobility then we can actually reduce that number by factor three because we need three times less charges so we can reduce about 50 billion euros of that so extrapolated to the rest of the world it means we can save humanity more than 100 billion on investing in this infrastructure if we use the sun as a direct energy source for all of our guards the question becomes do we really need to invest all of that in something that we might not need after all we started thinking about this concept back in 2012 we competed in the world solar challenge it's a huge competition where you drive from darwin in the north of australia to the south 3000 kilometers through the outback an interesting thing about this competition there's not just solo cars you also have combustion cars and those combustion cars are being used for the team and for the spare parts and all of these combustion cars will actually have to stop and refuel during the day and that's exactly how people think about electric cars nowadays because electric cars like to stop every time and combustion cars can keep going so basically this competition turns that upside down it's the electric cars it's the solar cars that can keep going and that made us realize that solo cars are not just more sustainable it's also just more convenient you don't have to stop to charge and that's exactly what people are looking for today we managed to win the world solar challenge four times in a row and with that experience and know-how light year was founded our mission is to provide clean mobility for everyone everywhere in order to do that there's two simple rules so one we do not want to be dependent on the uptake of charging infrastructure because that might delay things and secondly we want to provide people with an electric car they can start driving tomorrow so they don't have to change their habits that don't have to change their lives wherever they live the last five years we have developed that car that car that can drive independently from the grid and in order to do that we had to develop two things so one a car that is ultra efficient that uses less energy and on the other hand we needed to build solar arrays that have more energy yield and let me take you through how we did that in this graph on the left side you see what an average electric car draws from the grid every year so we reduce the energy consumption by increasing aerodynamic performance the second one is reducing mass reducing the weight of the car but also reducing rolling friction of the tires and last but not least we also improved powertrain efficiency so how efficient are the motors themselves and because we have motors that are directly in the wheels that don't need any gears it means that no heat is lost and because the powertrain is more efficient then in turn the battery can be smaller and if the battery is smaller then the whole car is lighter and also if the battery is smaller you can improve the aerodynamic performance so all these factors are interlinked and if you start with a blank piece of paper you can really leverage this effect and build something that is incredibly efficient so two times more efficient than cars on the road today that's one side of the story the other side of the story is that we can further reduce the energy you need from the grid by adding solar and we did that by building solar arrays that you can double curve you can curtain in order all directions so that means that you can build a much bigger panel on top of an electric car and we also develop electronics that make sure you can get the most out of the solar panel at every moment even when you're partly in the shade and this gets us to on average five times less charging and what is even more exciting is that all of these factors will keep improving into the future so all of these technologies will become better and we already see what we can do beyond the light year one if you think of it that means that a little bar that you see on the right will actually go down even further and go below zero so the car becomes energy positive it provides more energy than it needs and that's the case currently already with leicester one in some countries like italy and japan but in the future a lot more countries will have cars that are energy positive that deliver more energy than they need so let me show you what we can do today we put all of our technologies into one car and that's called the validation prototype and earlier this year we tested it on the test track and we drove 440 miles on a 60 kilowatt hour battery so that means that it's ultra efficient on that same day we got 26 miles from the solar panel directly on a partly cloudy day so it even means that on a sunny day it would get to even more so let me show you some footage [Music] today marks a huge milestone for us of which we're very proud we drove over 440 miles we did that on a single charge of just 60 kilowatt hours the core thing that enables this is the most important metric for any ev and that is efficiency so the energy consumption per kilometer and if you bring that down you can provide a lot of range on a small battery but at the same time with the solar panel that brings in the energy you can drive very far how would that work in practice how would that work in everyday life suppose you have a conventional electric car with a 60 kilowatt hour battery you would use it to drive your commute of 45 miles in la then you would have to charge about five times in a month meaning that you need either a charger at home or you need a charger at work if you would do that with the lighter one which also has the same six kilowatt hour battery you would get a lot of your commute directly back from the sun every day so that means you would only have to charge about once in that month and then suppose you want to go on a trip you are in la and you want to get to san francisco so with that conventional electric car you would need to charge three times to go on the trip so first the evening before and then on the day itself two times it would cost you 48 dollars and you would spend about two hours charging if you would do that with a lighter one you wouldn't have to charge the evening before you're okay so the next day you start driving you need to charge just once on the trip and then you would get to the end destination but also on that trip you can charge 100 miles earlier or 100 miles later so it's not very strict and you have the freedom to choose where you would charge for instance close the location where you want to have lunch or where you would want to sleep now we want to get this convenience into the hands of hundreds of year one customers across europe we're not doing this alone we have strong partners we can rely on one of those strong partners is wellmed automotive we tap into their decades-long production expertise also in electric vehicles so we can focus on the technology so in 2009 2010 we were producing already the first full electric vehicle walmart automotive is building its strategy fully on the transformation from combustion engines to electric vehicles all of our operations are fully set up for the electrification and the e-mobility walmart automotive has quite some experience over the past decade in working with startup companies what i like a lot with lightyear and with the car is really that lightyear is thinking ahead they are thinking not just electrifying the company or support the immobility they are thinking about building a car which is energy efficient and i think this anyhow will be the next step because it's not just electrifying cars the next step must be how can we drive as energy efficient as possible if we want to support the climate targets i like the ambition it's a very young company with very young people who are trying to change something what we all hope is that our relation continues and that we can go together into the next adventure in europe or worldwide [Music] another important partner is bridgestone their engineers together with our engineers have developed a tire that has the lowest rolling resistance of any tire they have ever developed and that makes electric one even more efficient together with these partners we're bringing a dream to reality next year we're going to deliver the first light your ones to customers and people can experience the convenience of having an ultra-efficient car with a solar panel on the roof delivering lighter one is going to be a pivotal moment in the industry so we can show next year that we can build cars that can drive directly on the sun but at the same time is just the first step our mission is clean mobility for everyone and we're the first to admit that the like you won our first vehicle is not an affordable car so it's not yet for everyone the larger one can show that you can go everywhere with just the sun and normal power sockets but the next step is really get to mass markets and build affordable cars for everyone we talked a lot about charging and together with range it's amongst the top three concerns that people have when buying an electric car and range has been sold for some cars but solving range charging and cost together at the same time is exponentially harder remember in the beginning of the presentation i talked about two factors being important for any innovation to scale to mass markets so one of them is that it has to fit into the lives of a lot of people but secondly it has to be a lot more attractive than current products in the market and if you're talking about a distinct advantage that these cars will have it's not just charging and range we're excited to share that we're going to bring the lighter one technology to mass markets and thereby getting to low cost as well like lecture one like you two will hit a home run on those key factors charging and range and it will improve not just by a bit but really by a large margin it requires about five times less charging than conventional electric vehicles and has about double the range compared to those same electric vehicles and when you do need to recharge the recharge will be quick from the normal socket drive at home or in a neighborhood because a small battery will be charged a lot faster than a big battery that brings me to the real breakthrough so if you do this at scale and have small batteries then you can make really affordable cars so we are going to start with watcher 2 at a 30k price point and you can do that because batteries are the most expensive part of an electric car and by doing this we can give all these advantages the charging convenience the range and the low price point to a lot more people around the planet and the great thing is that it's not just about purchase price it's also about how much it costs to drive the car because you get all the energy from a solar panel for free it's a lot more affordable to drive it so in the end these types of cars are going to be a lot more affordable than combustion cars are today to give people the possibility to benefit from that very low total cost of ownership we're going to provide a leasing option on like your two and you probably know lispland as being one of the biggest leasing companies on earth they have about 1.8 million cars in their fleet and they operate in 29 countries and we have been partnering with lease one since 2018 on the first lucky ones i'm proud to share the news that lee splunk has committed to an initial order of 5 000 light year twos this is not just a strong signal that lispland is committed to making clean mobility happen it also shows their confidence in the market for grid independent vehicles i want to thank lisbon ceo texconning and his team for his commitment the partnership and the leadership that they're showing and we're really looking forward to an even closer collaboration in the coming few years with leicester one we're going to show that is possible next year we're going to show that you can actually drive on the sun with a technology that exists today with watcher 2 we're going to bring that technology to mass markets and really getting very close to that clean mobility for everyone that mission that we have as a company by scaling solar cars we do two things so on one hand we make sure we get the electricity from a clean source directly directly from the roof of the car so we start reducing co2 emissions right away but at the same time we also make sure that we're independent from the uptake of charging infrastructure so it means that you can start driving electric cars without needing to wait for those charges to arrive and therefore these two things combined make sure we can get to clean mobility very quickly for everyone because you can use it everywhere so the future looks bright and hopefully everyone will be able to take their kids to the mountains and the glaciers will still be there

Channel: Lightyear

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Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021