Aptera's EV: A Hot Car with Cooling Prospects
Two years ago, the battery-powered Aptera was on track to be the Next Big Thing. In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle said that the Aptera "looks like as if it could soar." The verb was appropriate because the two-seat car resembles an airplane without wings. The newspaper said that the cars would begin to roll out of the San Diego County factory in a few months.
We're still waiting. After the initial launch was delayed as the cars were made more user-friendly (adding opening windows to the gullwing, top-hinged doors, for instance), a new date was set for October 2009. That didn't happen, either. And the company is not likely to meet its most recent goal of producing cars in 2010.
Last November, CEO Paul Wilbur told me, "We now have to adjust our production schedule to align with financing realities. Properly managing the resources of the company means we'll complete our first vehicles in 2010, not by the end of 2009 as previously projected." But 2011 seems more likely now.
Aptera's latest plan is to show off a "production-intent" car at its Carlsbad, California headquarters on April 14, at which time it will make announcements about future plans.
The biggest problem now is financial. Aptera raised $24 million in Series "C" investments, including money from such sponsors as Idealab, the Quercus Trust, Google.org and Michael Johnson of Esenjay Explorations. But as Elon Musk of Tesla points out to Knowledge@Wharton, "As far as new companies go, the car business is such a capital-intensive business. It doesn't lend itself to start-ups very well."
I asked Marques McCammon, Aptera's spokesman if the company had the capital to start producing cars. "As it stands right now, no," he said. "But we continue to raise capital and the situation is improving every single day."
Aptera does have a strategy, and it is interwoven with the Progressive Insurance-sponsored Auto X Prize. That high-profile contest, which will split $10 million among three contenders who come closest to producing 100-mile-per-gallon-equivalent cars or trucks, concludes in September. "We're using the Auto X Prize to validate the claims of our production-intent vehicle," McCammon said. "They have a lot of credible third parties involved." Many of the Auto X teams are university based or small and private. Aptera (along with India's Tata) is one of the larger and more visible players there.
Battery electrics obviously don't use gasoline, so assigning a fuel economy equivalent for them is a bit of a crap shoot. The Aptera claims 300 mpg, which certainly sounds good but is not verified by anything in particular.
The Auto X participation could change that, because the contest uses strict metrics for measuring what it calls MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) and it has retained Morey Corporation to put wireless telematic technology on all contestants' cars to track mileage (and feed it to Auto X's web page). "We'll supply raw data in real time," said Morey's chief technology officer, Emad Isaac. "It will be up to the judges to crunch the numbers and analyze the results."
Consumers won't buy Apteras just because they're cheap to operate, however--all EVs have that distinction, and competitors headed to market this year (Nissan's Leaf, Coda's sedan, Think's City, Chevrolet's Volt) probably have more credibility at this point.
In February, Aptera confirmed that co-founder Steve Fambro is no longer actively involved with the company, after having earlier said he was just "on vacation." He remains on the company's board of directors. It was Fambro who first sketched the exotic Aptera design (left), which he dreamed up while stuck in traffic. Co-founder Chris Anthony is still on board.
In a sense, the EV sector is in the same place the conventional car industry was a century ago. There's a lot of activity among dozens of companies. Some type of shakeout seems likely. Aptera was an early, high-profile player, and the lights are still on. But it cannot survive the inevitable carnage if it does not get a car on the road soon.