A special feature of the vehicle designed by the company is solar cells embedded in the plastic body panels on both the roof and the sides.

[3] Sono Motors was founded by Laurin Hahn, Navina Pernsteiner and Jona Christians in Karben, Hesse, in January 2016.

[4] Still in its founding year, the company succeeded in securing funding for two functional prototypes by conducting two crowdfunding campaigns: €549.995 by 1.686 backers on the internet platform Indiegogo, and €1.8 million on Seedrs.

During presentation tours through various European countries, interested parties were able to learn about the special features of the car and the mobility concept and take short test drives with the functional prototypes.

[5] In October 2018, Sono Motors raised new equity and debt capital in another financing round on Seedr, surpassing €6 million.

In March 2019, the company finally presented the (later modified) series design of the Sion production car, and on April 17, 2019 announced its manufacturer.

By 2021, the company was threatened by insolvency despite the successful funding round just one year before and now also licensing its technology to manufacturers of buses and utility vehicles like ARI Motors, MAN and EasyMile.

At the beginning of 2022, the city of Munich was testing an electric bus with Sono's solar cells installed on a trailer under real-world conditions.

[13] The solar cells were supposed to provide the bus motors with constant power and thus reduce the number of charge-discharge cycles of the batteries, extending their lifetime.

On September 8, 2022 the company published its Second Quarter 2022 report, citing strong growth, increasing Sion orders and a large number of business-to-business collaborations.

On December 8, 2022 Sono Motors announced[15] that it had again failed to collect enough money to complete production of the pre-ordered Sion vehicles, despite again reporting strong growth in the third quarter of 2022 and "21,000 Sion B2C reservations and 22,000 B2B pre-orders to date, reflecting potential net sales volumes of up to €1 billion" in its Third Quarter 2022 report released earlier on the same day.

The founders also stated they had been "on an extended U.S. tour to meet with potential investors, media and the community" experiencing "huge interest and high potential demand for our mission and technology", but decided not to enter the American market and raise additional funding there due to their inability to focus on completing the Sion project at the same time.

In the #savesion campaign, Sono asked for at least €50 million of additional money to "[..] achieve the next big milestone, the Pre-Series vehicles (SVC4) [..]", and posed this to the community in the form of a challenge to get 3,500 car pre-orders fully funded at a unit price of at least €26,900 each.