Aptera Electric Car: A Solar-Powered EV (We actually drove it!)

Speaker 1: All right, Speaker 2: Everybody. We're here at appera headquarters here to check out their solar powered car. Let's hop in and take it first. Speaker 3: Spin's a prototype. You definitely don't need to close them that work. Sorry. My bad. No worries, man. Speaker 2: When you see aptera's [00:00:30] solar powered electric vehicle, the first thing you'll notice is the sleek design, which prioritizes efficiency. Speaker 4: We just let the science dictate where the shape of the vehicle was how many wheels it was gonna have, how much it had to weigh. And then we ended up with this, a vehicle that gets 355 miles per gallon, equivalent and burns less than a hundred. What hours per mile, if you know the EV in Speaker 3: Ocular, when you drive 20 miles to work, leave it out in the sun for eight hours, and then it's it charged up those 20 miles again, maybe even more up to 40. And then, you know, you go back home without [00:01:00] using any juice. Speaker 4: So we started with aerodynamics and the shape you see in front of you is a cambered body, very aerodynamic, outboard wheel shape that has the lowest drag of any production vehicle ever built. Speaker 3: If you put the same solar array on a car, that's not as efficient, you're just not gonna get that benefit. And so it's not worth it to engineer it into the vehicle. The reason it works for us is because we've gotten the wa hours per mile down so much that the solar actually can become viable. Speaker 4: Three wheels is really a result of making the most efficient vehicle on the road, just by moving those [00:01:30] wheels out, we get nearly 20% better aerodynamics with the vehicle. Speaker 2: Appera has three of what they call alpha prototypes, one white, one, black, and the silver one that I wrote around in the parking lot. It wasn't until I took a spin in their beta prototype that I felt the full power of app. Terra's solar powered electric car, accelerating to highway speeds. Speaker 4: This one set up as a suspension demonstrator. So everything's out in the open, everything's easily accessible. Uh, we had it all instrumented up so [00:02:00] we could take it to the track and see the G forces on the wheels and make sure that everything can stand even the harshest of driving conditions. Speaker 1: Oh shit. All right. Speaker 3: Yeah. So we just reached about 70 miles an hour there, this here to 60 speed and this car is three and a half seconds to the three motor version. It's about 210 horsepower Speaker 4: In the appera. The motors are actually in our wheels. Uh, you see this green [00:02:30] band right here. Uh, that's actually a series of magnets that run regularly around, uh, the wheel motor. And if you see, when you move the tire, this green band moves, but the middle stays still. And that's, uh, unlike traditional electric motors where you usually have an armature and then you have a rotor inside. So the outside of the motor stay still and the inside spins, uh, this is exactly the opposite. You can have much more crushable space if you move the propulsion for the vehicle out to the wheels. Uh, so we actually enhance safety by having [00:03:00] the wheels incorporate the motor in them. Speaker 3: These two screens will be very similar to what you'll see in the production car. They'll feed you the side view mirror camera feed, as well as this rear view mirror, which is also a camera Speaker 2: Despite its tapered aerodynamic rear. The appera has a surprising amount of trunk space. And with a tent like attachment could be used for camping. The tent attachment scene here is just a prototype. They're still working on the final design. Speaker 4: When you tilt the seats forward, you actually have seven feet from [00:03:30] the back of the seats to the tail of the vehicle and you sleep with your feet down there. And your head back here, you can throw a couple mountain bikes back here. You can throw a seven foot surfboard. We also are able to charge this vehicle with almost any charging standard. Um, and even with just a one 10 outlet, the same outlet that you've used to charge your cell phone. Uh, you can charge this vehicle up to 150 miles overnight. We're taking pre-orders on our website. We have over 26,000 orders. Now we hope to have the first production vehicle delivered by the end of this year. We're hoping to build many thousands of vehicles in 2023. [00:04:00] So obviously it's gonna take us a little while to get through all 26,000 orders. Uh, but we're also planning to scale this facility that we have here up to over 20,000 vehicles, a year of production, and then open up several facilities around the us to do the same. The base appera vehicle costs $25,900. And we're working on a $7,500 tax credit. Now bringing that down to $18,400, that gets you 250 miles range. The appera comes standard with the roof solar and the dash solar. The, uh, hood is [00:04:30] actually a $300 upgrade and the rear hat to the $600 upgrade. So for less than a thousand dollars, you get the full, extra solar package to get you up to 40 miles a day of free solar Speaker 2: Charging as always. Thanks so much for watching. I'm your host, Jesse. See you next time.