Lightyear, the developer of solar electric vehicles, will redirect its focus and resources completely towards the development and production of Lightyear 2, its intended mass-market model. This means the suspension of the production of Lightyear 0, the first production solar car.

Accordingly, Lightyear has submitted the request to the court to open suspension of payment proceedings in relation to Atlas Technologies B.V., the operating company responsible for the production of Lightyear 0. This is a subsidiary of Atlas Technologies Holding B.V. Atlas Technologies Holding B.V., which holds the IP rights, and Lightyear Layer B.V. are not in scope of the suspension of payments proceedings of Atlas Technologies B.V.

Lightyear 2 teaser.

Unfortunately we had to make this decision. The whole process of developing Lightyear 0 has provided our company many valuable learnings over the past years. We are now redirecting all our energy towards building Lightyear 2 in order to make it available to clients on schedule.

Recently, we launched a waitlist for Lightyear 2 resulting in more than 40,000 subscriptions of individual customers and we already had approximately 20,000 pre-orders from fleet owners. We hope to conclude some key investments in the coming weeks in order to scale up to Lightyear 2, an affordable solar electric vehicle available for a wider audience.

—CEO and Co-Founder Lex Hoefsloot

Earlier in January, Lightyear signed a pre-order agreement with Arval, Europe’s #1 full service multibrand vehicle leasing company, and key player in sustainable mobility solutions, owned by the BNP Paribas Group. The pre-order entails 10,000 units of Lightyear 2.

The total of Lightyear 2 pre-orders from B2B partners now exceeds 21,000 units, corresponding to a revenue of nearly €840 million. This news came one week after Lightyear has opened the Lightyear 2 waitlist for consumers to get priority in the pre-order process later this year.