From Slashdot:
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.”
While I like the idea of electric cars for city travel (I have one a bit more practical than that above) I’ll admit that they don’t make much sense for an everyday family car, and making a car that looks like something out of a Woody Allen movie puts an even greater damper on the marketability issue.
The reason that many electrics are three wheelers are due to arcane laws in the USA that allow three wheelers to be licensed as motorcycles, with no upwards spped limit or crash testing required, while four wheelers must be limited to 25mph (40km/hr) as NEV’s (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles) or must go through crash testing that cost upwards to half a million dollars. While Leaf and Volt have passed that (Since Nissan and GM have deep pockets) it leaves the smaller companies struggling to find a niche outside of the limited “Ed Begely Junior” market.
Here’s a look at Leaf and Volt EV sales in the US from The Daily Bayonet:
===================================================
Nissan sold 672 Leaf vehicles and GM sold 1139 Volts.
Nissan is still far in the lead with a grand total for the calendar year at 8720, though GM is slowly closing the gap at 6142 sales. Note that for comparison purposes, the 326 Volts sold in December 2010 are not included. To balance this, Volts which spontaneously combust are not deducted from total sales, despite the total loss of vehicle, and sometimes the home too.
Whether or not stories of fiery Volts will affect future sales remains to be seen, though for a car in its early stages of adoption to require complex ‘power-down’ procedures in the event of accidents isn’t a good sign. Imagine if Ford had advised Pinto owners to follow a protocol to drain the gas tank after a collision. Not good.
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Cute little clown car for the 21st century.
did they only waste the investors money, or were there tax dollars involved also?
Many years ago I was involved in trying to build a practical electric car for UK use.
I wrote about for Jeff Id here:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/electric-cars/
It is not a perfect account, with hindsight I could have explained some things at greater length and dropped others. Ah well none of us are perfect.
Nevertheless it taught me all about electric cars and I have kept up my interest.
Mostly for amusement: we did all that and learnt from it over thirty years ago.
Still vast fortunes, mainly of the taxpayers money are to be paid to reinvent the wheel: usually square ones. If it is private money well; that’s fine.
I don’t know what it is that has got into the heads of an older generation such as myself who saw the technology back then as the future after the oil crisis of 74.except that it did not work then as we found out: and will not work today.
It is all a dream of what, I suppose, they think should have happened in some thirty years time. But it did not because it cannot. Life is not the movies where wonders happen. And yet these people believe in Hollywood miracles. And imagine by passing laws they can make it so.
Beyond this I have little to say other than Lithium is too thermally unstable to make of a good traction battery. I merely await the time when some Glitterati gets incinerated by their latest whatever.
Kindest Regards
We need to find out how many volts were purchased by government entities.
My guess they bought 90% of them.
I designed and built an electric bicycle many years ago, and have been keeping track of electric vehicles ever since. I would own an electric now, but it just doesn’t make sense. My daily commute is 5 miles round trip and that only takes 7 gallons of gas per month. Therefore, an electric would never pay off its up-front cost. So the niche for an all-electric car is a longer commute than mine, but not too long as to shorten battery lifetime. Plus it has to be a second car because it just can’t do all the jobs a typical American uses a car for. These factors determine that electrics will always be niche cars, but at least the advent of lithium batteries makes them far more competitive than the lead-acid powered GM EV1.
Silly and impractical. Less worthy than those dangerous mini-coopers that infest the roads and must be avoided lest a real car hurt someone. Someone watched too many The Jetsons shows.
A little unfair to the Chevy Volt, which won’t burst into flames until a few days after the event. Apparently something of a trickling time bomb
I don’t know if that 48 hours is two business days. 😉
Note to crash-repairers: Keep any crashed Chevy Volt well away from other vehicle and flammable materials. And don’t inhale if the smoke blows your way.
RIddle me this: With all the known lithium resources (roughly 2kg/capita globally) locked up in “environmentally friendly” batteries, will the only pink flamingos we see be made out of plastic?
they apparently had a loan for $150 million, but couldn’t raise matching funds.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/company-329744-aptera-mccammon.html
so we dodged that bullet: i guess the owners weren’t big donors to the SCOAMF’s campaign.
Why the snide & gleeful tone?
redc1c4 says: December 3, 2011 at 10:28 pm
did they only waste the investors money, or were there tax dollars involved also?
————————————————————
Not much taxpayer money in the Aptera. Big Government money (about $1 billion) did go to Fisker and Tesla. The high dollar Fisker (about twice the price of a Chevy Volt) is built in Finland but they keep saying they will open an assembly plant in the US. The $105K Tesla is assembled in the US, but heavily based on the British Lotus Elise.
pat says:
December 3, 2011 at 10:52 pm
I guess you haven’t seen a Smart car. The first one I saw was on its side. It apparently couldn’t handle an exit ramp from CDG north of Paris. The bus driver stopped briefly to photograph it with his cell phone. That’s a toy car that can kill real people. I prefer a solid steel Suburban.
It reminds me of a Buckminster Fuller car…….
Motoring enthusiasts (like myself) won’t like electric cars until they figure out how to make them with a standard manual transmission.
The real fundamental problem with them as I see it is that with a car that runs on liquid (or gas) fuels, you can “recharge” them within the space of 4-5 minutes, whereas an electric requires many hours to fully recharge the battery.
Aptera (genus), a genus of cockroaches
Another bottom feeding adventure in gay alternative energy and motive marketing, without engineering or economic credibility, ‘another one bites the dust’! It’s socialist cronyism dressed up in capitalist drag.
“…And another one gone (Solyndra) and another one gone (Evergreen Solar) and another on bites the dust (Aptera)! Hey! Hey!”
Even with deep pockets these EV’s are no where near “ready for prime time”, if they ever will be….
They need to get over to the UK it’ll be Electric car heaven here. Latest headline in the Sunday Times “Huhne plans 32,000 more wind turbines and new nuclear plants……The energy secretary wants to convert all Britain’s vehicles and homes to run on electricity by 2050.”
Link here (but behind paywall).
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Environment/article835755.ece
I climbed on the back of a giant albatross which flew through a crack in the cloud to a place where happiness reigned all year round;>)
Because it was not only predictable, but inevitable – but the “green” team refused to hear us. “Hey! There’s a cliff over there! You’re heading right for it! LOOK OUT!”
Now we’re supposed to act surprised?
Two cheers for coal-powered cars. Oh well; nobody’s going to buy the silly things anyway.
A while back, I visited the Aptera website, and was very turned off by the deceptive claim regarding gas mileage. Many readers would have said: Oh, isn’t that wonderful! But it wasn’t. The figure was based on an assumption that most of your energy consumption while driving would come from electric power that the batteries stored while the infernal machine was plugged in. They could have said that if were able to plug in whenever you wanted, and if you drove at a sufficiently slow speed, that you could drive across the USA, with zero petrol consumption. That would have been more honest. The number that they gave was garbage. I think that Aptera deserves to go belly-up.
@Gary Young Pate
For electric vehicles, remember Josh :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/15/24-hours-of-climate-reality-gore-a-thon-hour-19
I am not sure why you would bother, when you can get an old Porche 911 and fit it with a decent electric engine. It can even give the original model a decent challenge, apparently as the engine is that much lighter, I am told. The balance is better because the batteries re mid-car, and the rest is pretty much the same. As batteries get cheaper, so will these.
I’d imagine the car could benefit from brakes that recharge the battery, but that probably requires some safety testing.
When I need to add miles to my vehicle, it takes about five minutes to put enough chemical potential energy into it for 300+ miles of non-stop driving (sans bio-breaks).
At the time when EV can meet or beat that, they will become viable.
Very cute looking coal-powered vehicle. I’ll admit they are snappier looking than your average golf cart.
I wonder if all the little children at SlashDot are still calling them Electric rather than Coal powered. Kids. You gotta love them.
That’s a shame as the hybrid version was going to do over 300mpg (358mpg imp)
Back in 2008 I worked out that it would pay for itself in 4 years with just the Fuel Duty and VAT I wouldn’t then be paying to Her Majesties UK Gov from travelling to work.
That’s why these projects fail .
As soon as the eco-nutters find out that no battery will take you more than 50 miles and that CO2 does not drive climate these stupid toys will all go the way of the dinosaurs.