The cheap solar-powered car you might NEVER need to charge | SONO SION

[Music] [Applause] [Music] ah hello there don't mind me just having a little recharge in the sunshine because that's the thing about the sun it has magical recharging powers doesn't it and the sad thing about modern electric cars like this one for example is they don't make use of that fact if you want to charge it you got to plug it into a wall oh why can't we use the energy from the sun of course the other slightly difficult thing about many new electric cars they are quite expensive and that's a shame too because it means a lot of people can't afford them well we're in northern munich today which cameraman andy has politely described as the milton keynes of munich because it's where all the car stuff is to visit a very special car a car that does charge using the sun a car that is affordable to buy it's an old friend of the channel if you're a loyal subscriber you might just recognize it but it's changed an awful lot since we were last here this is the sono motors scion and this is fully charged [Music] okay we are here in sono house this is hq for the company i'm with lauren who's the ceo and founder hi everyone hi jack thank you for having us again yes so beautiful what i like about the way you've arranged this space is we can kind of walk around it and we can see the timeline of the company and it all starts with this contraption behind us so that's the very first prototype we built i believe hand built if i'm right renault twingo right i say these a-class headlights a little bit of everything going around here you're right when did this all begin when was day one for the company well uh 2012 actually 2012 we built this uh the very first time in the garage here in munich it was four to two meters small garage very tiny and took us three years hand built sweat and tears and afterwards it worked so it was the first technical visibility study we did right how old were you when you had the idea for this car um i think at that stage we were like 18 19 so very young we just finished school and we wanted to do something for the better and we wanted to have a solution and then went into the garage and built his first car [Music] now we've seen solar on electric cars before and generally speaking it's a little kind of helping hand it gives you a few extra miles but because we have seven and a half square meters of them 248 christian 248 solar panels i believe solar cells a lot of solar we're talking proper range here these guys reckon that on average on average not on a really sunny week you're looking at about 70 miles of range being added every week just from having it parked outside your house on a sunny week we're talking 150 miles and they've run the calculations and they reckon that roughly equates that 70 miles to what the average munich driver does in other words if you lived in munich and you had one of these you could do all of your driving from solar power all of it that's astonishing something that's noticeably different from the video that we shot here two years ago and the earlier prototype that we filmed but these solar panels are now beautifully flushed they're really integrated into body work they're not protruding and also i don't know how well this is going to come out on the camera but when we were inside in the shade they were virtually invisible it just looked like a matte black car but now we're out in the sunshine these beautiful navy blue solar panels are sort of emerging from the bodywork as they suck the power out of the sun and force it into that battery it's just so cool to think about by the way it can charge in diffused light as well so if you have a driveway and it's a bit shady don't worry you are still getting charged now in terms of charging the car via a plug if you don't want to use the sun or the sun's not doing enough for you up to 75 kilowatt hour charging which is pretty quick here's the cool part 11 kilowatt-hour ac charging in either direction right so you can park this outside the front of your house someone with a tesla model s could come parked next to you they could charge at 11 kilowatts that's properly quick seriously impressive battery 54 kilowatt-hour usable lfp battery as well which we basically only see on the chinese-made tesla model 3. the guys inside were telling me this makes a lot of sense for this car because lfp batteries don't mind being charged to 100 as much and because of the solar qualities of the car it's going to be charged to 100 quite often [Music] and then this is a familiar face yeah because this is what johnny and robert drove two years ago exactly netherlands yeah so what are we talking here we're a little bit parts been still we kind of got i3 uh gear clusters and exactly but it's starting to take shape here yes that was i would say a concept car where we have integrated all concept we wanted to have it sears and and we will get feedback and see whether people like it or not it's still not serious a lot of carryover parts a lot of you know you see the it's not perfectly integrated to solar sure but are we getting there under here we have right various different charging ports but you also have a domestic socket right now exactly modern high-end ioniq 5k ev6 you can plug in a three-pin plug you can you can make a coffee you can power your chainsaw but when i watch the video which is two years old johnny and robert are saying i've never seen this before so you got there first this was a very cool idea that we're seeing kind of uh actually we're very popularized now we've been really first with that and first mover we still first move over 11 kilowatts ac okay right i think hyundai on all the other cars you mentioned they have a domestic socket uh 3.6 kilowatts you can have it as an output we have 11 kilowatts you can charge tesla you can discharge 11 kilowatts you can actually charge another electric car pretty quickly charge the tesla we have um powered at home we just brought out a wall box which is the puzzle piece for powering up your home so this is home storage on wheels [Music] little browser the interior well let's let's start with the moss shall we not something i get to say very often in car reviews it has minor air purifying benefits it's a much more traditional way of air purifying than you know having a pollen filter down there somewhere and it just looks beautiful it's such a lovely piece this i really really like the addition of that quite like this slightly speckled plastic as well this is of course a car designed with affordability in mind that is one of the main things that they're looking for so we don't have ultra premium wood and leather everywhere it's simple and effective i'm sure there'll be a little bit more refinement added between now and production but i imagine that this is pretty close to being it so much like the exterior we've got lots of plastic because plastic is cheap and it's easy to make and you don't have to work with the body shop and have them construct complex pieces for you no you just heat form some plastic slap it on there that's part of the reason that they've been able to keep the price down on this car that has so much advanced technology in it and this is interesting looking on the screen here i can see how much energy we are drawing from solar at this exact moment now on this prototype we're only drawing energy from the solar panels on the roof at this stage but currently 89 watts of power is being sucked into this car from the solar panels on the roof right now as i sit here we're charging [Music] now then this is what we came to see this is the latest and greatest exactly now to the untrained eye quite similar but a lot has changed what are the big ones well it's uh from a rare uh motor to a front motor so that's huge um it got bigger a little longer crash structure improved um solar integration more smooth you know you almost not see the solar cells anymore um we we had a third window we integrated the sharing app so a lot of things there's a lot of serious components already the solar is much more smoothly integrated like you say it really is just so slick with the body work but it gives you a good impression where we want to go being that family-friendly mass-market affordable electric vehicle everyone can afford and making this really daily for daily use right this is my absolute first go in the sonos ion at least driving it in the back seat here out of shot i've got jacob who is the test driver he's done more miles in this than anyone probably and he's going to critique my driving of the car i think right it's a short driving route we've only got a little bit of private property to drive on but enough to get a little taste of what it's all about so let's see here oh that's quiet i like the whoosh reminds me a little bit of the old say at me electric and kind of got nice big squashy tires high profile tires small wheels on this car and you can really feel that immediately it's a it's a squashy boy we've got a front motor set up so we're front wheel drive now which is sort of what you expect from a small family car like this and it really suits the personality of the car i think another thing i'm noticing as i drive here is the sheer simplicity of the driving experience you think a tesla is straightforward well i've got no driving modes i've got no regen strength settings to choose from it's just completely straightforward there's no sport mode there's no eco mode the car is what the car is it's smooth it's punchy but it's gentle as well and likewise the regen strength is actually the maximum that they are allowed to give the car so if i take my foot off now slows right down because again this is an electric car it's about conservation of energy so why would you want anything other than maximum regen strength is the logic incidentally while i'm driving i'm still being shown on the screen here my uh amount of charge that i'm getting because we're still charging while driving aren't we we're still charging i'm using it and it's driving i'm just gonna oh see that's not bad at all that's a punchy little motor this is a bespoke motor from these guys and it's gotten bigger since uh robert and johnny were here a couple a couple years ago as has the battery so we've got a little bit more performance a little bit more range circa 190 miles of range but of course that range is always topping up it's always topping up it's like having a soft drink that sort of refills from the bottom as you sip it it's a lovely notion just knowing that we are gaining range or at least losing less range as i'm driving because we're still charging we're always charging we've seen integration of solar on electric cars before but the the numbers that you're talking about in terms of the amount of power that you can be drawing is there's more than i've heard on any electric car is that because we have so many solar panels is it because your solar panels are so clever is it some combination of the two uh combination of of two it's like we have installed 1.2 kilowatts peak and you have always one part in the shade right so you need an intelligent system which is uh coordinating that that's our mcu maximum power point tracking control unit we have developed this in-house so this is how do you get the electricity from the panel actually in the high voltage battery and that's our know-how it's not just about solar panels and solar integration it's about how do you do the e and e work that you get really the electricity maximum and the maximum efficient way into the battery [Music] right oh come on come on look at the space in this thing completely flat floor completely flat because we do have bespoke eevee architecture underneath us their very own bespoke eevee architecture which is designed to be quite modular quite adjustable and easy to scale the idea being that they want to build lots of these and who knows maybe some more models after it and when they do the architecture is there and ready to go again clean simple design not super premium materials but it's fundamentally an economy car so i can deal with a bit of plastic especially when it means i have a self-charging solar car at my disposal i'm going to ask you what is probably a stupid and obvious question but at least one person is going to be wondering this why matt black is it the case of like when you wear a black t-shirt in the sunshine you get hotter it helps right well it's uh it's more efficient yeah um if if the light is reflecting you lose light if it's not you get more light into it actually waver into the actual solar cell that's why we made it uh matte but the question here is um do the people like it and yes they voted for we gave them two options classy or matte black they voted for matt there you go [Music] i think the thing that really blows my mind with this guy i think that fries my noodle is the integration of the solar tech with the car sharing functionality because this was a car that was designed from the get-go to be shared sono has a very nicely designed app you can go into that app as the owner and you can say right i'm going on holiday holiday this week i want to share my car and you can make it available for rental and the car is designed in such a way that other people can unlock it via the app on their phone they can also use it as a portable charger someone can drive up park next to you plug in and use your car to charge theirs and you as the owner can decide how much charge you're going to let them have how much charge you are willing to give away in the past when we talk to people about electric cars we try really hard to help them understand that that upfront cost may be scary but the amount of money you're going to save relative to ice in the first couple of years needs to be factored into your decision well in this car you need to consider the fact that it's going to earn you money it's going to make you money so yes it's 25 000 euro before any government grants but in the first couple of years of ownership you might make some of that back so boot space is very important in a family car big boxy thing so you're expecting a big boot let's have a look when you look at that and you think yeah that's not a bad boot but wait underneath the boots there's a boot look at that 650 liters all told and perfectly square i know johnny got very excited about the perfectly squareness when he reviewed it because it just makes life easier often you've got big bulges here and a big lip to get over and it's just annoying you're trying to get a buggy in and the kid's crying and it's wrestling with this thing no perfectly square very very easy drop the seats down you still have a perfectly flat floor with those down as well and then we're talking 1200 litres of storage it's like a little minivan fantastic and here's something i really like about this car there are no optional extras there's no spec sheet to go through checking yes i want the climate control i don't want the android auto no no in the name of cost saving in the name of making this car affordable there is one sonos ion and you buy it like this that's how it comes that is part of the reason that they've been able to keep that price down there is one option you can see it here can you guess what it is towbar there you go optional tow bar whether you like it or not that's a that's there for you we don't know exact towing capacity just yet but i'm assured a trailer with a couple bikes on no problem at all the final question the big one when can i have one and how much do i have to pay for one well 25 uh a thousand euros yeah so pretty affordable right for 40 grand because we're not sure if the german grant is staying next year and is including german vit so it's 20 21 400 without v80 right um and it's coming in 23. it really just feels like they've come at this from a completely different angle this is a new approach to designing a car with sharing in mind from the get-go statistically most cars in europe are sat outside the driveway or outside the front of the house unused for 23 hours of the day i can vouch for that my car sits there doing nothing most of the time and i drive a lot for work so why on earth wouldn't you have a car like this that you can rent out that you can make money off that you can share with the public it makes sense environmentally it makes sense for your wallet [Music] then concluding thoughts on the sonos sign well i guess my question to you good people are fully charged is are you not entertained are you not entertained because this is what you ask for cheap electric cars it doesn't get much cheaper than this 25 000 euro and it pays you for the privilege of owning it it pays you and that's one takeaway from this car one of the big ones is how beautifully that combination of a solar charging and a car sharing model blend together i can see one of these parked on the end of every street in london available to rent three years from now it makes so much sense but actually the other takeaway from this car is what is taking the big boys so long we just came from the munich motor show we looked at vw's id life concept sub 20 000 euro small electric car fantastic when are they building it 2025 meanwhile these guys which started as two mates at university they're going to put this thing into production two years earlier there are no excuses anymore for the likes of vw our dbw get on with it give us cheap stuff but in the meantime we'll be just fine because we've got companies like sono doing the lord's work in their stead so there we have it do let us know in the comments what do you make of this ingenious little contraption if you have been thank you for watching [Music] well if you enjoyed that episode you're going to love this one and this one too is very relevant to the topic and also if you want to subscribe to fully charge which is a wonderful thing to do really helps us cost you nothing 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Channel: Fully Charged Show

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Keywords: electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, kryten, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, solar, Sono Motors, Sono Sion, Sono Sion review, solar energy, solar charging, solar panels, solar cells, affordable electric cars, affordable EVs, car sharing, car charging, charging

Id: U5LKU6bWScc

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021