Imagine that you’ve decided to start a company selling products. Presumably one of your goals is to make money. One of the typical ways of making money in a product-producing business is to sell products, the more the better.

Sono Motors is a German automotive startup.

What probably makes things somewhat more difficult for the company than would be the case were it to be producing vehicles of a somewhat conventional nature: the Sion, it’s forthcoming vehicle, is described as “the world’s first affordable solar electric vehicle.”

I’m not even aware of unaffordable solar electric vehicles.

The company says that it has more than 18,000 reservations for the Sion.

Of course reservations aren’t sales.

Sono Motors has developed an app. The Sono Carsharing app.

The company says this is meant to address the 43 million or so vehicles in Germany that are driven for an average one hour per day.

Regardless of the brand, the app will allow vehicle owners to share their vehicles.

Johannes Bückle, Head of Product at Sono Digital, said, “Three things were important for us when designing the Sono Carsharing app: how can we reduce the number of cars on our roads while at the same time increasing the utilization of all the vehicles that are just standing around, and also, as a higher-level goal, make significantly more efficient use of vehicles as a resource? The concept originally developed exclusively for the Sion was not enough for us, so we expanded the scope to include all private cars.”

Think about that: the company is working, on the one hand, to get its Sion on the road, but on the other, reducing the number of Sion (and other vehicles) being on the road.

Possibly a noble undertaking but certainly a strange way to start a car business.