Fuyao, the world's largest automotive glass maker, says it can mass-produce solar sunroof glass, with unconfirmed reports linking it to BYD's Han and Tang at around NZ$2,000.
The world’s largest maker of automotive glass says it can now build solar sunroofs at scale, putting photovoltaic cells inside laminated car glass to generate electricity for a vehicle’s auxiliary systems.
Fuyao Group describes the product, reported by pv magazine, as a solar sunroof rather than a roof-wide array. The cells sit within the glass laminate, and the power they produce runs onboard electrical equipment rather than driving the wheels.
Worth knowing before anyone calls this a breakthrough: there is no new announcement. Fuyao has carried a photovoltaic sunroof product page for years, illustrated with an image dating to 2018, and told investors back in May 2024 that it could already mass-produce the glass and was supplying it to vehicle programmes whose makers asked for it. What has moved is the volume, and the attention.
Chinese motoring media have reported since February that the system was developed jointly with BYD and would appear as an option on the Han and Tang at 8,000 yuan, roughly NZ$2,000. The same reports credit it with 720W peak output and 23.18% efficiency using heterojunction cells.
Neither Fuyao nor BYD has published technical specifications or confirmed a joint programme, and Fuyao declined to name customers or discuss pricing at an investor briefing in March, citing commercial confidentiality. Treat the numbers as unverified until one of them says otherwise.
What Fuyao has disclosed is capacity. Its plants at Fuqing Yangxia and Hefei each reached three million sets of automotive glass a year by the end of 2025 and are ramping up through 2026. How much of that is solar glass, the company has not said.
Its own product page is looser than the reporting, claiming the cells generate “energy to drive the car”. The engineering reality is considerably more modest.
Vehicle-integrated solar is not about charging the traction battery. A car roof simply does not offer enough area, and even the most optimistic output figures translate to a few kilometres of range a day in ideal conditions.
Its real use is the parked car. Solar glass can run ventilation on a hot day, keep standby systems alive and slow the twelve-volt battery drain that plagues modern vehicles left sitting for weeks. For anyone who has returned to a car parked at an airport for a fortnight, that is a more useful trick than it sounds.
New Zealand conditions suit the idea better than most. This country has some of the highest UV levels in the world, most cars live outside rather than in garages, and summer parking in an unshaded lot is a national pastime.
Solar on cars has a long history of promising more than it delivers, from the Sono Sion to Aptera’s three-wheeler, which remains the most ambitious attempt to make the sums work. Nissan showed a solar-panelled Ariya concept in January. The difference here is the supplier: when the company that makes glass for a large share of the world’s cars says it can produce something in volume, the technology stops being a concept and starts being a line item.
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