Fuyao Glass, one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive glass, has listed a new product for sale that it says can generate electricity from a car’s roof glass. But before you get too excited: this doesn’t mean solar-powered electric cars are right around the corner.

Almost as long as electric cars have been a thing, the thought of powering them from the sun has been an attractive idea. Why not greatly reduce the need for a large battery if we can just collect all the power we need from the sun?

The problem is, it doesn’t work quite like that. The amount of sunlight reaching the surface Earth, over the area of a car, is simply not enough to power that car.

It hasn’t stopped people from trying. Student competitions make successful solar cars all the time, like the ones at the Electrek American Solar Challenge and Formula Sun Grand Prix. But those are tiny, ultralight, single-occupancy vehicles that bear little resemblance to what we see on the road.

The trials of Aptera are an indication of this. The company has been developing an electric car with a solar roof for years upon years now, and is finally getting there with driveable prototypes (that we got to take a drive in! ). But it’s got a lot of compromises compared to a normal car, and still doesn’t produce enough solar to completely power itself on the road (though thanks to a large battery, many drivers will generate enough solar to power their whole commute, once you account for the solar power gained while parked).

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