More than 5,000 Sion reservations placed

The Munich startup Sono Motors has passed the 5,000 pre-order mark for their solar EV, less than a year after its presentation, and with more than a year before production begin.

For each of the 5,132 pre-ordered vehicles, a down-payment has been placed, according to Sono Motors. Several hundred cars have also been fully paid for already. The current state of reservations is equivalent to a turnover of more than 100 million euros.

The Munich startup announced the target of 5,000 pre-orders at their launch event in July 2017, and has reached it in less than a year. The production is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2019, with the support of a yet-unnamed European contract manufacturer.

So far, more than 10,000 people have test-driven the Sion. The pre-orders come from 33 different countries, with more than 80% of the orders from the core markets in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In the past 4 weeks alone, another 1,000 orders were placed.

It was also recently announced that ElringKlinger received the contract to develop and supply the complete battery systems for the Sion. The contract, with an 8 year time limit, is worth several hundred million euros.

electrive.com (PDF)