Aptera: Launching the Space-Age Electric Car
Paul B. Wilbur has 27 years experience in the auto business, including four years at Ford and 17 at Chrysler. Most recently, he was the CEO of major sunroof maker ASC. His latest venture, Aptera (the name means “wingless flight” in Greek), is definitely the biggest departure of his career. This year, he’s launching an electric car.
Aptera’s partners in a 2008 Series C round include Idealab, Google.org, Esenjay Investments, the Simons family, the Beall Family Trust and other, mostly California-based private investors. To date, the company has raised $30 million, Wilbur said, but it embarked last week on an undoubtedly more challenging Series D round to raise $75 million more to take the company through its launch. Aptera is building its own dealer network. There are almost 4,000 advance orders for the car, each one representing a $500 deposit.
Aptera, based in Vista, California, wants to be a mainstream carmaker, but with a product that looks anything but mainstream. Wilbur has dreams of eventually building 100,000 Apteras a year, but much more modest production (initially for California only) starts in October. If fuel efficiency sells, he’ll have a winner. The Aptera 2E electric car, with lithium batteries, gets the equivalent of 200 miles per gallon and charges up from a 110-volt outlet for one to two cents a mile. The entry-level price is $25,000.
And if public attention added up to sales, the Aptera would be a home run. Wilbur recently brought two cars to Manhattan, and offered rides to journalists. People stopped, stared, and yelled out, “I want one.” Cab drivers honked their horns. The Aptera has only three wheels and looks like an airplane without wings. Its two front wheels are covered for aerodynamic flow and set out on struts, just as they’d be in a Piper Cub. The doors flip up, and one half expects a space alien in a jumpsuit to emerge.
The design, first sketched out by co-founder Steve Fambro, wasn’t fanciful; it was intended to achieve maximum energy efficiency. Using composite body materials, the car achieves light weight (1,700 pounds) and a .15 coefficient of drag. There will be both gasoline and hybrid versions of the Aptera in 2010, and both look good on paper. The gas version, with a .7-liter engine, gets 100 mpg and has 1,000-mile range. The gas engine in the hybrid can trickle charge the batteries—an elusive goal in the Chevy Volt.
“We’re very innovative,” says Wilbur, “which is both good and bad news.” The good news is that the shape works. The bad is that it is classified as a motorcycle by the federal government, and thus ineligible for the $25 billion Department of Energy advanced technology loan program. Aptera has enlisted two California Congressmen to introduce legislation that would clear the way for Aptera’s federal funding. If the company taps into that rich vein, Wilbur says it will use the money to greatly expand its California manufacturing base from its current 20,000 a year limit.
Video: Paul Wilbur talks about the Aptera:
Jim Motavalli is the author of Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future, among other books. He has been covering the environmental side of the auto industry for more than a decade, and writes regularly on those topics for the New York Times.
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