Dutch solar carmaker Lightyear declared bankrupt by the court in January, has managed to find eight more million with mostly private investors, a group of 225 people around Amsterdam entrepreneur Arnoud Aalbersberg. Lightyear has announced the founding of a new company that will focus entirely on Lightyear 2.

This might enable the company to reboot and focus on the Lightyear 2 family car with some 100 of the 620 employees who lost their job. The €250 000 Lightyear 0, of which just a handful was produced by Valmet Automotive in Finland, is dead and buried.

Even with the astronomic price tag, the Dutch start-up lost money on every Lightyear 0 produced. That led to the bankruptcy of the part of the company that actually had the car built in Finland.

Holding the patents

The holding company, Atlas Technology Owners BV, with investments from Swiss Zero Point Holding, the Dutch government, funeral insurance company Dela, and Swedish sports carmaker Koenigsegg, has also been declared bankrupt. This was a step “necessary to complete the restructuring of Lightyear as a new company”.

They hold the patents on the solar technology and the electric motors incorporated into the wheels and the rights to the Lightyear name. They agreed to reboot the project of the solar car and will get shares in the new company, like the group of private investors around Aalbersberg.

Losing their €80 million already invested

These people who invested over €80 million in the company and saw their money likely to vanish with the bankruptcy will get a seat on the supervisory board. Aalbersberg said they want to be able to push some buttons defining the company’s future.

That future will entirely depend on the ability to market the family solar car Lightyear 2. Finding potentially interested clients wasn’t an issue so far. This one, a more compact ‘grid-independent’ sedan with integrated solar panels and a range of +800 km, got an ‘affordable’ target price of €40 000.

No timing set

At CES in Las Vegas in January, the company was still confident production of the Lightyear 2 would start at the end of 2025. The company managed to attract 40 000 orders from private buyers while leasing company Arval signed for 10 000 units and LeasePlan for another 20 000.

The free and non-binding waiting list guaranteed people a ranking when ordering opens. Still, timing other than that the car is expected in 2025, one year later than initially suggested, has never been communicated. A new timing is not in sight, nor who will build the Lightyear 2. So, starting delivering in 2025 becomes very unlikely.

Now that the curator has approved a reboot, experts estimate that Lightyear will need more than a billion euros in new funds to set up mass production. Lightyear says it is ready to search for new financing.

The Lightyear 0 was planned for production in the Finnish Valmet plant. There are no plans yet to produce eventual future Lightyear cars in Finland. The Finnish company has been obliged to cut a thousand jobs last month because several contracts to produce cars, including Lightyear, have been canceled.