Sono Motors definitively stops with Sion solar car, continues to develop solar panels
Sono Motors will not take the Sion solar car into production after all. The company has been trying to raise money since December to make the car, but has decided to abandon the project due to the current economic conditions.
“Despite the 45,000 reservations and preorders for the Sion, we were forced to respond to the continued instability in the financial markets and streamline our business,” says co-founder and CEO Laurin Hahn. It company says that they could not convince investors and governments to invest more money in the company.
The Sono Zion
In addition, ‘especially in the early days of Sono Motors’, decisions were taken that still affect the company today. “Any delays due to fundraising or other factors impacted the development of the Sion and therefore the timeline, which in turn required us to raise more money.”
Sono Motors has raised millions through several investment rounds and reservations, including from private individuals. For the next two years, people who have reserved a Zion will get their money back, including a five percent bonus. The first payment will be made in May. Reservations and investments in the context of the recent #savesion campaign are not collected by the company; these investors have therefore not lost their money.
The Sion was an electric hatchback with hundreds of solar panels on the roof, hood and doors. They should offer an average of 112 km of range every week. With the full 54kWh battery, the car should have been able to drive 305 kilometers. Sono says he wants to sell the Sion branch; it is therefore not excluded that another party will still take the car into production.
Together with the termination of Sion, Sono Motors will lay off about three hundred of the four hundred people in the context of cost savings. The Sion project demanded a lot of money from Sono: about ninety percent of the money budgeted in 2023 was for the solar car. Sono continues to believe in the integration of solar panels in electric vehicles and wants to continue to develop this further, but as a supplier. The company says it has 23 business customers for that solar panel branch, who want to use solar panels for buses and trucks, for example.
Sono Motors’ vision of solar powered vehicles