After 6 Years, Aptera Motors Is No More

After years of beautiful concept cars, envy-inspiring demos, and missed production targets starting in 2008, high-efficiency car startup Aptera is liquidating its assets. A pointed excerpt from Wired's account: "The truth is, Aptera always faced long odds and has been in trouble for at least two years. The audience for a sperm-shaped, three-wheeled, electric two-seater was never anything but small. It didn’t help that production of the 2e — at one point promised for October 2009 — was continually delayed as Wilbur ordered redesigns to make it more appealing to the mainstream. Aptera had a small window in which to be a first mover in the affordable EV space, and that window closed the moment the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt hit the market. At that point, Aptera teetered on the brink of irrelevance." As a compulsive driver, I had been hoping to one day drive one of these to save gas money.

Who?

[hipp5]

Doesn't help that I'd never heard of them.

wrong target audience

[roman_mir]

This car is interesting but it was aimed at the wrong consumer. US consumer cannot afford this vehicle, because US consumer is subsidized (especially now with the Government Motors), and all the various loans, that make it too cheap for the US consumer, who can't really afford the new cars buy them with government guaranteed loans.

The company should have moved the idea to China and started there and aimed at the local Chinese market. I think they were going with a more or less correct idea in terms of the product, but they were not doing it at the right time and definitely not aiming it at the right clients.

Aptera vs Solyndra

[Doc Ruby]

House Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been holding hearings [politico.com] on the corruption he accuses Obama having when Federal loan guarantees were given to Solyndra, the large solar startup that went out of business this year. Issa has also been busy denying his own work using his own power to try to get the same loan guarantees for Aptera, which is in his own district. Now Aptera has also failed. Will Issa investigate himself for corruption? [factcheck.org]

Re:The problem...

[jeti]

If you're new to building cars, you can't go for cheap. You can't compete with mass-produced cars on price and you don't have the capital to set up mass production. If the manual labor required for assembling your car makes it 10k more expensive than a comparable car of a big company, your best hope is to produce cars for a market segment where the uniqueness of your model is worth the additional cost to enough customers.

That's why most small car companies produce super sports cars. It doesn't matter if they cost 210k instead of 200k. But selling a small car for 25k when the competing product costs 15k just doesn't work. Tesla was smart to start with the Roadster. Now they have the means to go after a bigger market with the Sedan.

Very disappointed

[sandytaru]

I've been watching them since they first started working on the car. I cheered them on at the EV races two years ago. The Aptera was a great concept car that showed energy efficiency could look really cool in a way that no other EV has quite achieved yet. Even if it had a plain old boring conventional motor, the aerodynamic shape would have given it a good boost in gas mileage, and it just looked stylish. It really is a pity.

Re:As Usual

[sandytaru]

The thing is, I liked the design the way it was. It was cute. It was the Jetson's car without the flying.

Re:As Usual

[optimism]

So...how shall we explain that the ego-designed iPod, iPhone, and iPad won over the "good enough" alternatives?

so much hate

[0111 1110]

What's with all the hate for the Aptera? Did the owner rape your sister or something? I can't believe so many of you are getting so worked up about hating this guy and his company and his car. I smell some kind of agenda, although I can't imagine what it could possibly be. Maybe you guys work for companies that make those pathetic hybrids that barely get more than 50 mpg? It was a concept car that never made it off the ground. It could have been any small automotive startup. The fact that it was a car that looked like an airplane and got much higher gas mileage than anything else on the road in North America is not why they failed. Even for major manufacturers, most concept cars never see the light of day. I would have bought an Aptera if they could have sold it for less than 30k. It was strikingly beautiful and had an incredibly low coefficient of drag. I think it would have been one of the best cars ever made.

For now I will continue to salivate over Volkswagen's efforts with the XL1 [dailymail.co.uk]. Although I much prefered the former, more radical, tandem 2 seater L1 [ecogeek.org] A real jetson-mobile.