Jeff Siegel and the Angel Publishing folks have touted tons of “Tesla is in big trouble” stories over the past few years, pitching the next big thing that will disrupt the EV leader, and this time it’s the self-charging car.

Not self-driving, self-charging — meaning, you don’t have to plug it in. It’s all about having solar panels on the vehicle, as you might have guessed, and in any real-world scenario that can’t provide nearly enough electricity for regular driving for today’s electric cars… but, well, it’s something. The crowd-funded purpose-built lightweight solar cars like Aptera’s claim that they’ll be able to extend the driving range by 40 miles just from the solar panels, and we’ve actually seen Siegel pitch “solar cars” before — he touted Sono Group last year for its Sion project, a car whose body panels would be covered with solar cells, and that project fizzled (the company dropped the Sion project and decided to try to sell bus kits instead, and the stock collapsed to a nickel and was delisted after they “filed for insolvency” in March, which I guess is like a US bankruptcy.

Incidentally, the other solar revolution stock he touted at the same time, back in December, was Proterra, which I thought looked a little less bad than Sono Group at the time, but that didn’t stop it from having a couple terrible quarters and some financing trouble and going bankrupt a couple weeks ago in its own right. Which makes for quite a package — we shouldn’t be shocked to see a bankruptcy, there are always a few teased speculative stocks that disappear or go bankrupt in any given year, but I don’t think I’ve ever written about a teaser pitch where an ad promoted two different stocks which both went bankrupt in less than a year.

When I first saw Siegel’s latest “rise of the self-charging car” pitch, I figured it was just another tease for Sono Group (was SEV, now SEVCQ), but then I saw that the stock had effectively disappeared… so it must be something else this time.

Turns out, it is — Siegel is now promoting the solar panel company that makes the flexible panels which might be used on “self-charging” electric cars.

Will the story be more hopeful this time? Let’s see what the ad tells us… they’re selling subscriptions to Green Chip Stocks ($299 first year, renews at ?, 90-day refund period), and this is how the pitch starts:

“Tesla in BIG trouble?

“Rise of the Self-Charging Car

“Forget fossil fuels, lithium batteries, or hydrogen fuel cells…

“Because these new cars charge themselves even as they cruise down the highway…

“And every one of them NEEDS the tech produced by ONE small firm that you can own now before shares explode…”

So, as is pretty much always the case with a teaser ad, there’s “one little known firm” that will own the future…

“It has the potential to make early investors incredibly wealthy in the process.

“That’s because solar-powered cars, like the three I just showed you, are no longer a pipedream.

“Over the years, solar panels have become SO cheap and SO efficient that the auto industry — particularly the booming electric vehicle industry — is starting to integrate them into vehicles.

“But these… cars aren’t powered by just any run-of-the-mill solar panel…

“These cars are equipped with panels specifically suited to automobiles…

“Panels that are 34% more efficient than conventional solar panels…

“And only made by ONE company most people have never heard of.

“But I predict it will soon be a household name in America…

“And could hand ground-floor investors a MASSIVE windfall…

“With potentially bigger gains than you could’ve made if you bought Tesla when I recommended it at $13 a share…”

Are you getting our free Daily Update
"reveal" emails? If not,
just click here...

When it comes to clues, we’re told that every automaker is looking for ways to integrate solar panels, but that at least one, the aforementioned Aptera, is charged by this company’s panels, integrated throughout the body of the car. I have no idea whether or not Aptera will really be able to deliver their vehicles, but people are making crowd-funded investments to be in the first wave of production if that happens, and apparently these solar panels are critical…

“With a solar-powered car, you may never need to connect to a charger again!

“That’s pretty incredible when you consider that most drivers are stuck paying about $4 for a gallon of gas…

“Or $17 to fully charge a Tesla every six hours.

“That’s why this isn’t just a car…

“It’s your very own energy generator on wheels.

“But the ONLY way this new car can run on 100% solar power is with THIS little-known company’s solar panels…

“That lead the entire solar power industry in efficiency, power generation, and longevity. “

And then, to lay it on pretty thick:

“This small company is at the epicenter of the stunning $689 billion solar electric vehicle revolution.

“It could make you more money in the coming months than you’ve ever thought possible.

“EVERY SINGLE automaker has ZERO choice but to embrace solar electric cars…

“OR be left in the dust.

“And they’ll ALL clamor for this company’s solar panels…”

So what makes these panels so special? More from the tease, which indicates that this is a somewhat mature company that’s already selling lots of solar panels, they’re not just waiting around for the auto industry to demand more solar generation:

“Tens of millions of solar panels produced by this firm are already powering homes, communities, and businesses worldwide…

“All thanks to its exclusive contract with one of the world’s biggest, billion-dollar solar installation companies…

“But like I said, its panels are even BETTER suited for powering cars.

“Here’s why…

“It’s the world’s most durable, most powerful, and most efficient solar panel.

“Its patented, diamond-shaped solar panel is extremely flexible.

“It’s all thanks to a special copper foundation…

“Which gives it the unique power to bend under tough conditions where standard panels break.

“That’s why these panels are NOT limited to just being placed on a vehicle’s roof.

“They can easily mold to a car’s curves.

“They can also be placed on the doors, trunk, and even on the dashboard to absorb sunlight from virtually EVERY angle!”

So it’s flexible, it is efficient, it can last longer than conventional panels, and Siegel says “EV makers are lining up to ink deals with this little-known company.”

Any other clues? The ad says the company’s management team has a track record in this industry:

“The company’s CEO has already led a successful solar company.

“Prior to taking the helm, he oversaw the team who developed the first mass-produced solar panel of its kind…

“And made early investors 366% in less than two years.

“But now I expect him to easily blow that gain out of the water.”

This is Maxeon Solar (MAXN), which is essentially the old solar panel manufacturing business of SunPower (SPWR) — they separated with a spinoff about three years ago, after SunPower survived two different near-bankruptcies over the past decade. Here’s how Maxeon describes itself these days:

“Built from 35 years of boundary-pushing solar DNA, Maxeon Solar Technologies spun-off from US-based SunPower Corporation in 2020. We now independently design, manufacture and sell our industry-leading solar panels in more than 100 countries around the globe. As Maxeon, we continue to push the limits of solar innovation through the record-setting efficiency and unmatched reliability of our flagship Maxeon line panels, while our value line Performance panels offer superior reliability and output compared to conventional panels.”

Maxeon’s solar cells and panels are still used almost exclusively in rooftop solar installations — the use in automobiles or other more flexible and cutting-edge applications is talked about some on their website, and they highlight some of the projects, like the Lightyear One prototype solar car, but none of that is likely to have a meaningful impact on revenue in at least the next couple years. I don’t know what the future holds, but designing products into mass production cars takes a very long time, and requires substantial testing… and they’ll probably also have to drive the costs down further.

I wouldn’t say this idea of a revolutionary self-charging car is a “never,” but I would say that we’re a long way from having solar panels on every car… and much longer from having them provide a meaningful amount of the electricity that the electric car needs (some of the panels available now have simpler goals… like keeping the battery from running down while you’re parked and still running the AC or listening to the radio, etc.). Some folks think it will never make sense as a real part of the charging infrastructure for electric cars, just because there’s not enough square footage of panels and the cost will always be meaningful, but perhaps we should keep an open mind about possible future advancements (there’s a pretty critical rundown of the solar power math and the cost of these projects here, just FYI, and another that looks specifically at the failed (so far) Lightyear One and Sono Sion projects).

For right now, Maxeon is a maker of pretty robust solar cells and panels, mostly for rooftop solar installations, with some potential to expand the use cases of solar because they can make flexible and durable panels. I don’t think they’re the only ones who can make flexible solar panels, but that capability is a core part of what they claim, and presumably those claims are at least somewhat meaningful (I’m not an expert, for sure).

And that’s a pretty tough business, because it’s relentlessly competitive and also gets caught up in tariff/trade wars from time to time. Here’s what SunPower’s share price did over the past decade, to give some idea of the challenge — that’s the share price in purple, revenue in orange, and earnings per share in blue:

And here’s what those same metrics look like for Maxeon in the three years since this panel-manufacturing part of the business was spun out as a separate company (it doesn’t have positive net earnings, so that’s left off of this chart):

Right now, analysts think Maxeon is going to recover from their meaningful losses last year (loss of $6 per share) to get close to break-even in 2023, losing only 24 cents per share, and likely become profitable in 2024, on the back of steadily improving margins and 20-30% revenue growth. If that trajectory holds true, it’s certainly possible for this to work out, but I don’t have any great conviction about Maxeon being a standout among the solar panel manufacturers — at the moment, that means you’d be paying about 100X 2024 (adjusted) earnings for Maxeon shares, with a price/sales valuation of about 0.5. There’s room for much higher valuations than that for sustainably successful companies in the solar panel space, giant First Solar trades at 23X next year’s adjusted earnings and about 6.5X sales, with similar levels of revenue growth despite its larger size…. but it’s also possible to get quite a bit more beaten-down, too, Canadian Solar (CSIQ) trades at about 0.25X sales and about 5X 2024 earnings estimates, despite growing earnings at better than 10% per share. Those are all very different companies, and I don’t know how their product lines compare, just wanted to give some perspective on the range of valuations we see in the competitive solar panel manufacturing space.

It’s also likely that the government incentives and US push in green manufacturing will have an impact on where these kinds of panels can be profitably sold — Maxeon does have an assembly plant in Mexico and is planning on building manufacturing capacity in the US, probably in New Mexico, so that would probably be a positive as they try to meet government incentive/tax break guidelines, but they do most of their actual solar cell manufacturing right now in the Philippines and Malaysia… which is politically better than China, at least for the moment, but doesn’t necessarily get them in the door when incentives and tax breaks require that manufacturing is done at a plant in the US or in a country with a free trade agreement with the US.

That said, I haven’t really studied the solar panel manufacturing business in many years… and that’s mostly because it’s brutally competitive and growing fast and highly tied in with government incentives around the world, even as the manufacturing capacity in this area is also seen as strategically important in many countries. That’s been a recipe for underperformance for all the companies I’ve ever looked at — selling solar panels is a good business, installing them can be profitable, running solar farms to generate electricity has often been a decent business because of government incentives, and the suppliers who have new and critical products at the right time, like the micro inverters that turned Enphase (ENPH) into a growth darling a few years ago, have sometimes had a run of really great years… but for the most part, it seems to me, the companies who make the solar cells and panels have not generally had a great track record of growing earnings. Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t been all that tempted to put my capital to work in this particular space.

And by the way, if any of the “special reports” caught your eye in Siegel’s pitch, I can at least tell you that the “solar window in every home” pitch about “an invisible, see-through coating that can go on ANY window, capture sunlight, and convert it into electric power”… that’s very likely yet another repeat of his long-running (and very unprofitable) recommendation of SolarWindow (WNDW), which we’ve been covering, through a couple name changes, since 2010. He doesn’t actually drop hints, and, to be fair, there have been plenty of different “thin film” or “transparent” solar panel breakthroughs in labs over the past dozen years beyond what the folks at WNDW are doing, but he has loved this stock for so long that I assume it’s more of the same. Here’s what that stock has looked like since he first pitched it at 62 cents in 2020, just FYI (they’ve been around even a bit longer than that, and you can see the occasional spike from the moments when they got a fair amount of news attention or newsletter focus, but so far, in 20 years, they have generated no revenue, and that pretty much always means that a company has to sell a bunch of shares just to cover its costs… that’s the share count, in orange):

So there you have it… more huge big-picture claims about a new technology, and a pretty low probability that the daydreams spouted in the ad will be coming true in the next few months, so you’ve got plenty of time to think it over before you make your decision. If you see great things ahead for Maxeon, or have other ideas in the solar space that you think make a lot of sense right now (even if you’re not quite sold on “solar cars” just yet), please let us know with a comment below.