Sono Motors will permanently stop using the Sion solar car and will continue to develop solar panels

Sono Motors will not put the Sion solar car into production after all. The company has been trying to raise money to make the car since December, 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 Sion

In addition, decisions were made ‘especially in the early days of Sono Motors’ that still affect the company today. “Any delay due to fundraising or other factors had an impact on the development of the Sion and therefore the timeline. That in turn meant that we had to raise more money.”

Sono Motors has raised millions through multiple investment rounds and reservations, including from private individuals. Over the next two years, people who have reserved a Sion will receive their money back, including a five percent bonus. The first payment will be made in May. Reservations and investments made under the recent #savesion campaign will not be collected by the company; so these investors have not lost their money.

The Sion was an electric hatchback with hundreds of solar panels on the roof, hood and doors. These 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 put the car into production.

Together with the termination of Sion, Sono Motors will lay off approximately 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 for 2023 was for the solar car. Sono continues to believe in the integration of solar panels in electric vehicles and wants to continue developing this further, but as a supplier. The company says it has 23 business customers for the solar panel branch, who want to use solar panels for buses and trucks, for example.

Sono Motors’ vision of vehicles with solar panels