FAW's Hongqi brand has built what it calls the industry's first perovskite photovoltaic sunroof prototype, integrating the material directly onto curved automotive safety glass rather than using conventional crystalline silicon. Fitted to the Hongqi EHS7 electric SUV, marketed in China as the Hongqi Tiangong 08, the sunroof can generate up to 300 W of power under strong sunlight and around 400 kWh over a year. The technology remains at the prototype stage, with no mass-production timeline disclosed.
Hongqi EHS7, which is marketed in China with the name Tiangong 08. Photo: CarNewsChina
The EHS7/Tiangong 08 is a five-passenger SUV measuring 4,925 mm long, 1,950 mm wide, and 1,680 mm tall, with 253 kW (339 hp) of peak power and a WLTP-rated range of 475 km. Hongqi said it passed over crystalline silicon for the sunroof because the material is fragile and offers lower efficiency for the application, choosing perovskite instead for its light weight, thinness, flexibility, high light-to-electricity conversion efficiency, tunable coloring, and lower cost. Integration wasn't without difficulty: perovskite's known vulnerability to water, oxygen, and ultraviolet exposure, combined with the curved geometry of the sunroof glass, reportedly posed challenges for the development team.
For now, the roughly 400 kWh the sunroof generates annually is intended to power low-voltage functions such as air conditioning, refrigeration, and sentry mode rather than propulsion. Hongqi's roadmap calls for extending perovskite photovoltaic elements to other body panels, including the hood; if that expanded panel area is realized, the company projects up to 10 kWh of generation per day, enough to add roughly 80 km of range daily. Hongqi cites its own data showing that distance would cover more than 85% of Chinese drivers' daily travel needs, though the 80 km figure remains a development target rather than a confirmed production spec.
The sunroof prototype is one piece of a broader push by Hongqi in the battery-electric vehicle market: the brand's next-generation models are set to adopt BYD's fast-charging technology, said to take a battery from 10% to 97% charge in nine minutes, and Hongqi has also begun testing a solid-state battery prototype with an energy density of 380 Wh/kg.
The sunroof is a separate effort from a flexible perovskite photovoltaic roof program FAW has pursued with module supplier Mellow Energy, which uses flexible, module-based construction validated at up to 21.79% efficiency rather than Hongqi's rigid, glass-integrated design. Between the two, FAW has now disclosed two distinct automotive perovskite PV efforts within the same week.
