Lightyear 2 waitlist goes live, 500+ mile range solar EV priced below $40K for US customers
Less than a month after kicking off production of its flagship solar EV the 0, Lightyear has begun teasing images of its second, much more affordable model, the Lightyear 2. Following an announcement this morning, Lightyear has opened up its waitlist to pre-order the Lightyear 2, which will be sold in the US, UK, and Europe. It promises to deliver over 500 miles of range on a single charge with the help of our Sun and start at an MSRP below $40,000.
Lightyear is a Dutch solar EV company that we’ve been following for several years, due in part to its bold promises of extended range vehicles with sleek designs, but also at affordable pricing. The startup had long promised to deliver its Lightyear 0 to market, a solar electric sedan that inevitably arrived as the most aerodynamic production car ever made.
We got a chance it take the Lightyear 0 for a spin this past summer and were quite impressed with its design both inside and out. Lightyear began production of 946 planned units this past December at Valmet Automotive in Finland, forever solidifying its place in history as the first to bring a solar EV to market.
Although much of the public’s eye has been on the Lightyear 0 for the past four years, the company has been working behind the scenes to deliver its second model, the Lightyear 2. While its predecessor is a marvel to both the eyes and the spec sheet, it starts at an MSRP of $250,000 and has remained out of reach for most average and perhaps more affluent consumers.
Lightyear has been quite cognizant of this high price point and has urged fans of the company to “hold on.” As an encore to the Lightyear 0, the startup has been promising to deliver the Lightyear 2 in 2025, targeted around $30,000. Flush with new funding this past September, Lightyear relayed that it remained on track to deliver a consumer-friendly solar EV. Now that Lightyear 0 production is underway, it has turned its focus in bringing such a dream vehicle to reality.
I know what you’re thinking. Shaving over $200,000 off a vehicle design feels impossible, and in my multiple interactions with Lightyear co-founder and CEO Lex Hoefsloot this past year, I continued to pepper him with questions about the Lightyear 2 and its extremely alluring affordability, curious how they’ll be able to pull it off. Here’s what he told me in Finland this past December:
I think people will be amazed actually, by what is possible in high volume, because of course, the question we get the most, for good reason is “how the hell guys, do you get it from 250K (euros) to 30K?” What people underestimate about Lightyear 0 is that we focused so much on picking the technologies that are fundamentally scalable. That’s also puzzling to people why we can do it, but we’re really confident we can get to that price point.
Following today’s news, the Lightyear 2 should arrive at a bit higher price than originally promised, but if and when it joins the Lightyear 0 on roads, it has the makings to be a slam dunk in value. Check out some of the first images shared this morning.
Join the waitlist for the $40k Lightyear 2 now
According to a press release from Lightyear early this morning, the official waitlist for the Lightyear 2 is now open on the company website. By joining the waitlist, customers in the US, UK, and EU can remain in the know for updates surrounding the Lightyear 2, including being the first to submit an official pre-order.
Hoefsloot again spoke to the company’s next big step in bringing solar EVs to the masses, soon in markets around the globe:
Lightyear 2 will fast track our mission of delivering clean mobility to everyone, everywhere. This is the first EV that allows consumers to prioritize sustainability, without compromising on practicality. By harnessing the power of the sun, Lightyear 2 elevates the electric driving experience and reduces reliance on strained electricity grids. In fact, while Lightyear 2 vehicles require less charging from the electricity grid than a conventional EV, they also flip the script by providing clean energy back into the grid.
While the company is not sharing many details of the Lightyear 2’s performance just yet, it is promising to deliver over 500 miles (800 km) of range on a single charge, combining its battery power with the free daily energy from the Sun. As you can see in the images above, it fits the same design profile as the Lightyear 0, but in a more compact shape. Still it offers seating for five and the ground clearance of an SUV.
Despite this lack of details available to the public, the company says it already has 21,000 pre-orders of Lightyear 2 from international leasing and ride sharing partners like LeasePlan, MyWheels, Arval and Athlon. According to a spokesperson for the company, the planned mass market volume of Lightyear 2 production should provide enough for both the commercial partners and consumers alike, so those 21k reservations shouldn’t affect customers who pre-order their own personal SEV.
Lightyear is promising an update on its production partner alongside an overall production update. It is also promising to share a full design reveal this coming summer. You can join the Lightyear 2 waitlist here.
Electrek’s Take
If this solar EV makes it to market, I’m in. While there are certainly less expensive EVs available on the market today, $40,000 is definitely a tough price point to get beneath and still sits as a relatively affordable number compared to other models.
This is especially true when you factor in the 500+ mile range and the capability to garner free miles from a ball of gas in the sky. Given that the Lightyear 2 is now being advertised around $40k instead of the originally promised price about $10k less, its clear that Lightyear has a better idea of its final design and supply chain and has faced reality. Even at a higher price, I think under $40k will be quite enticing to consumers, as long as it can stay around that number when production begins in 2025.
One of the things that impressed me most in talking to the team in Spain this past summer with the Lightyear 0 is the technology itself. Lightyear developed much of the tech including solar panels and motors in-house, and now that they’ve mastered it within the 0, they told me they are quite confident that they can scale it efficiently with the Lightyear 2. We as consumers should benefit.
It’s also exciting to see this model coming to the US, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle with California-based solar EV company Aptera. Both companies have been publicly supportive of one another for the good of solar EV adoption, and its exciting to day dream about the possibility of two, long-range range solar EVs becoming available to US consumers.
In visiting the Lightyear 0 assembly line at Valmet Automotive last month, it’s clear that Lightyear will need to significantly ramp up its footprint to support mass production. Whether that means more lines at Valmet or a second production partner is unclear, but the Lightyear is promising a production partner update in the near future.
Trust that I will keep you in the know, and as soon I can get in or near the Lightyear 2, you’ll be the first to see it. Until then.
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Kilito Chan | Moment | Getty Images
Electricity prices are rising quickly for U.S. households, even as overall inflation has cooled.
Electricity prices rose 4.5% in the past year, according to the consumer price index for May 2025 — nearly double the inflation rate for all goods and services.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in May that retail electricity prices would outpace inflation through 2026. Prices have already risen faster than the broad inflation rate since 2022, it said.
“It’s a pretty simple story: It’s a story of supply and demand,” said David Hill, executive vice president of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former general counsel at the U.S. Energy Department.
There are many contributing factors, economists and energy experts said.
At a high level, the growth in electricity demand and deactivation of power-generating facilities are outstripping the pace at which new electricity generation is being added to the electric grid, Hill said.
Prices are regional
U.S. consumers spent an average of about $1,760 on electricity in 2023, according to the EIA, which cited federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course, cost can vary widely based on where consumers live and their electricity consumption. The average U.S. household paid about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in March 2025 — but ranged from a low of about 11 cents per kWh in North Dakota to about 41 cents per kWh in Hawaii, according to EIA data.
Households in certain geographies will see their electric bills rise faster than those in others, experts said.
Residential electricity prices in the Pacific, Middle Atlantic and New England regions — areas where consumers already pay much more per kilowatt-hour for electricity — could increase more than the national average, according to the EIA.
“Electricity prices are regionally determined, not globally determined like oil prices,” said Joe Seydl, a senior markets economist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
The EIA expects average retail electricity prices to increase 13% from 2022 through 2025.
That means the average household’s annual electricity bill could rise about $219 in 2025 relative to 2022, to about $1,902 from $1,683, according to a CNBC analysis of federal data. That assumes their usage is unchanged.
But prices for Pacific area households will rise 26% over that period, to more than 21 cents per kilowatt-hour, EIA estimates. Meanwhile, households in the West North Central region will see prices increase 8% in that period, to almost 11 cents per kWh.
However, certain electricity trends are happening nationwide, not just regionally, experts said.
Data centers are ‘energy hungry’
The QTS data center complex under development in Fayetteville, Georgia, on Oct. 17, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Electricity demand growth was “minimal” in recent decades due to increases in energy efficiency, according to Jennifer Curran, senior vice president of planning and operations at Midcontinent Independent System Operator, who testified at a House energy hearing in March. (MISO, a regional electric-grid operator, serves 45 million people across 15 states.)
Meanwhile, U.S. “electrification” swelled via use of electronic devices, smart-home products and electric vehicles, Curran said.
Now, demand is poised to surge in coming years, and data centers are a major contributor, experts said.
Data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.
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Data center electricity use tripled to 176 Terawatt-hours in the decade through 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Use is projected to double or triple by 2028, the agency said.
Data centers are expected to consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the Energy Department said.
They’re “energy hungry,” Curran said. Demand growth has been “unexpected” and largely due to support for artificial intelligence, she said.
The U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, according to the International Energy Agency.
Continued electrification among businesses and households is expected to raise electricity demand, too, experts said.
The U.S. has moved away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to reduce planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions.
For example, more households may use electric vehicles rather than gasoline-powered cars or electric heat pumps versus a gas furnace — which are more efficient technologies but raise overall demand on the electric grid, experts said.
Population growth and cryptocurrency mining, another power-intensive activity, are also contributors, said BPC’s Hill.
‘All about infrastructure’
Thianchai Sitthikongsak | Moment | Getty Images
As electricity demand is rising, the U.S. is also having problems relative to transmission and distribution of power, said Seydl of J.P. Morgan.
Rising electricity prices are “all about infrastructure at this point,” he said. “The grid is aged.”
For example, transmission line growth is “stuck in a rut” and “way below” Energy Department targets for 2030 and 2035, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, wrote in a March energy report.
Shortages of transformer equipment — which step voltages up and down across the U.S. grid — pose another obstacle, Cembalest wrote. Delivery times are about two to three years, up from about four to six weeks in 2019, he wrote.
“Half of all US transformers are near the end of their useful lives and will need replacing, along with replacements in areas affected by hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” Cembalest wrote.
Transformers and other transmission equipment have experienced the second highest inflation rate among all wholesale goods in the US since 2018, he wrote.
Meanwhile, certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online, said BPC’s Hill. There has also been inflation in prices for equipment and labor, so it costs more to build facilities, he said.
In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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