Tag: Tesla

FAQ: How does a solar car work?

Arjo van der Ham — Co-Founder

A solar car is a car that uses the sun as its main source of energy. You might know some experimental solar cars from the World Solar Challenge, a biannual 3000 km challenge through the deserts of Australia.

The first known long distance solar car is The Quiet Achiever. Built by the brothers Larry and Garry Perkins, this car crossed the Australian continent from west to east in 1982. It reached an average speed of 23 km/h. Over the years, battery and solar technology have improved. A lot. In 2013 the World Solar Challenge introduced the Cruiser class for more practical family cars. Today the technology is at an adequate level to start the development of commercial solar cars.

How do solar cars work?
At its core, a solar car is an electric car – one with an unlimited, free and wireless power source which it takes anywhere it goes. Basically, a solar car consists of a solar panel, a battery and one or more electric motors. All these parts are co..

The seemingly impossible car

Arjo van der Ham — Co-Founder

Technology today is evolving faster than ever. When you stop and think about it, the possibilities seem endless. Every day, a lot of great (or to be honest, most of the time not-so-great) ideas pop into my, our, or your head. Although the seemingly impossible ideas are hard to achieve, it does not have to imply that they are bad ideas. That’s why at Lightyear we like to do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to check the feasibility of some of those ideas.

Before we founded Lightyear, we used to meet every Thursday evening to do just that. After concluding that we wanted to start a business to make this world a better place by combating climate change, we started looking for the best solution. The first step we took was to investigate the underlying causes of human induced climate change, and we quickly found the following graph:

Total greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands, 2014, World Resources Institute.

We were s..