It's less to solar panels and more to poor use of solar panels and not wanting charlatans to sour solar panels for useful things by trying to scam people with them.

For this price you'd be better off buying a luxury ev, getting a new roof on your house and installing solar there. you'd have money left over and be able to actually put a meaningful charge on your car using solar that way.

FWIW the appeal would be for those who can’t get their own roofs (aka majority of worlds population). The price point is likely to capture the initial hype.

Wouldn’t be surprised if the car itself is more like recumbent bicycle - ultra efficient vehicle with solar on top.

This comment is spot on. Configuring the most expensive EV I could think of (Porche Taycan Turbo S) with all the options I could easily add comes to about $225K USD. That leaves ~$30K USD for a solar install to match the price of the Lightyear..

No hate on panels, the engineering claims just come pretty close to not passing the sniff test.

I did a bit of math once to work out if panels could power my (future) Cybertruck and it wasn't even close.

So maybe they have very efficient panels and the car is very light? But the Lightyear One as described on the (marketing) site is not obviously possible.

If I put some rechargeable D batteries in a hybrid car and let you plug it in and charge them (for 1 kWh of storage, say) at around 10x the cost of a non-plugin-hybrid, you'd be upset if I advertised that as a plugin hybrid car, right? It is, but it's not. Same with the solar panels on this thing.

Exactly.

Even if it only gives you 20% of your commute, or 10 miles per day or w/e, what's wrong with that? It is better than burning a fossil fuel, also better than burning a fossil fuel far away, transporting the energy and pretending it's clean now ...