You’re Wrong About Aptera
Why don’t electric cars have solar panels I’ve heard many people answer this question with they’re too expensive well no saying they’re too expensive isn’t wrong per se but the real reason electric cars don’t have solar panels is because they’d be useless this is a 100 W solar panel well ideally anyway in
General use it’ll produce a little bit less than that we’ll call it 100 Watts for Simplicity sake if I let this sit and soak up the sun and generate 100 Watts for an hour it will have generated 100 watt hours of energy that’s how that
Unit works if that 100 W hours is added directly to the battery of an EV how far will 100 W hours get an EV down the road one of the most efficient EVS on sale today is a rear wheeel drive standard Range model 3 that car in mixed driving
Can easily achieve 5 m per kwatt hour which is 200 W hours per mile in other words charging a base model 3 with this solar panel for an entire hour is enough to get it only half a mile down the road and that’s before you factor in charging
Loss and the fact that this probably didn’t produce 100 Watts continuously for that entire hour that’s why electric cars don’t have solar panels the number of solar panels you could fit on the small available surface area on a car would be effectively useless so with that in
Mind why is apter why is aptera building their cars covered in solar Panels aptera is a startup automaker based in Southern California and this is what their looking to bring to Market and it’s called well aptera it doesn’t have a model name this is an aptera gamma prototype it has a carbon composite body shell three wheels Hub Motors it is Mega efficient and it is
Covered in solar panels to open the door and that will make it to production oh thank you it’s getting no no no no no no get back in there this is the gamma prototype behind me are three Alpha prototypes they’re less finished this is a little bit more finished but
None of these really represent production this is closer to production but the interior of the production cars will be completely different and they let me drive it for being a really early prototype of a SPAC Shippy three-wheel thing this feels surprisingly normal and it’s really roomy in here
Too this is awesome it goes right it goes W the steering is really good too look at this it’s so it feels so fun this is way better than I expected I expected a janky prototype this drives like a real car if you’ve heard of aptera before you likely know this as a
Solar powerered car their marketing plays pretty heavily into that too and indeed this is a car that has solar panels built into it that it can charge from but I don’t think you should think of this as a solar powered car because the ability to charge from solar panels
Is just a byproduct of this car’s real main purpose the extreme pursuit of efficiency this is a 1 L Bott bottle of gasoline okay look I forgot my prop at home it’s a gallon of coolant but just use your imagination all right 1 US gallon of gasoline contains
33,700 wat hours worth of energy or 33.7 kwatt hours which means this one lit bottle contains 8.9 kilowatt hours while there’s an incredibly large amount of energy stored in this small 1 L bottle of gasoline the problem is how it’s used internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient they operate in
An efficiency of 25 to 35% usually on the lower end the vast majority of this energy is lost is waste heat so this 1 lit bottle of gasoline 8.9 kwatt hours worth can only get this F-150 4.8 M down the road assuming 18 MP gon or for a less gas guer example it
Would take a modern Prius almost 16 Mi down the road electric vehicles don’t have this massive inefficiency built in they typically use 80 to 90% of the available energy so in the energy contained in this 1 L bottle of gasoline my hstar 2 could travel 25 Mi the rearo
Drive model 3 example from earlier could drive 45 Mi and this aptera aptera claims this car can hit an efficiency of 10 m per kilowatt hour 10 that’s 100 wat hours per mile so on the energy contained in this 1 lit bottle of gasoline this thing could drive 89 mil
Now let’s assume for a minute that they’re not able to hit their efficiency goals and it can only hit 70% of their goal that’s still 62 mil on one lit of gas I think that’s a pretty clear illustration of how efficient this thing is but I have another number to throw at
You 10 m per kilowatt hour is the equivalent of 337 MPG us while we’re on the subject to numbers here’s some fun but not entirely relevant information about this pickup the 18 MP gallon this can achieve is equivalent to 0.5 m per kilowatt hour or
1,870 wat hours per mile and the 36g gas tank on board can hold 1.2 megawatt hours of energy if the aptera could hold 1.2 megawatt hours of energy it could drive for 12,000 miles without stopping do you think anyone will be taking their aptera to a track D I hope so it’s
Fun no ABS in the Prototype is there no so how are they achieving this extreme efficiency well the most obvious way is aerodynamics I mean look at it all the are covered it’s shaped like a teardrop it comes to a full taper in the back this thing has a drag coefficient of
0.13 for a point of reference a Mercedes eqs or a lucid air have a drag coefficient of 0.2 which is practically brick-like in comparison I didn’t notice this until later but there is practically zero wind noise inside the aptera which is especially impressive when you consider this prototype has no
Sound deing and the windows were down 15 mph go and that’s at half power that’s really good the production version will be twice as accelerative as this one watching the footage back I think I might have discovered why the gamma prototype was limited to half power watch the wheel
Covers yeah probably shouldn’t shouldn’t twist that much this video is brought to you by Factor ready to heat meals delivered straight to your door Factor meals are delivered straight to your door in a chilled box and all you have to do to prepare a factor meal is pick
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Thanks again to factor for sponsoring this video now back to aptera Motors gear reduction boxes they add weight they add places for friction to happen so this has Motors in the wheels in-wheel Hub Motors one for each wheel each rated at 50 kilow and 1,100 lb ft of torque this is that Hub
Motor with integrated dual caliper brakes each one is rated at 50 KW which gives the aptera a total power of 150 KW or 200 horsepower and 3,300 lbet of torque because the motors are in the wheels with no gearbox the at the motor and at the wheel torque
Numbers are the same thing 0 to 60 on the production version will be around 4 seconds and later on there will be a variant available with just front-wheel drive with one of the Hub Motors emitted as you might imagine that will be slightly slower the body is carbon composite slight correction the body
Structure is forged carbon composite but the exterior body panels are fiberglass so despite having a 40 some odd Kow battery on board this thing only weighs 1,800 lb and lower weight means lower rolling resistance on the tires and less weight to push forward during acceleration making a car this efficient
Isn’t complicated it’s just a matter of putting all those things together in one car the result of this focus on efficiency is like I said earlier a claimed efficiency of 10 m per Kow hour an efficiency so high it makes the addition of solar panels useful that’s
What I mean when I say this car isn’t about the solar power it’s about the efficiency having solar panels become useful is just a bonus bu product and it also helps with marketing solar powered car is a lot more catchy than really efficient car and this is about half
Power right now yeah this is great and we’re going 41 m an hour indicated I’m going to stab it it has a little bit more grunt grunt off the line in the production version the motors will basically be silent which is a shame because listen to how
Cool the motors sound in this Alpha prototype because the APPA makes such good use of its available Energy 1 hour of charging from this measly 100 W solar panel is enough to get the aptera nearly a mile down the road but the aptera doesn’t just have 100 watts of solar
They managed to find a way to put 700 watts of solar on the aptera on the hood on the dash on the roof and then some on the back there which aptera claims will be enough to add 40 mil of range per day from just charging on the sun and by the
Way they make these solar panels themselves in house the reason I don’t think this should be thought of as a solar powered car is because the extreme efficiency that this thing has has far more benefits than just the ability to charge it from the sun when aptera goes
Into production when not if the launch configuration will have a 40 KW hour usable battery pack a Nissan Leaf base model also has a 40 Kow hour battery pack in a leaf 40 Kow hours is good for about 150 M of range in the aptera 40 KW
Hours get you 400 m of range again that’s assuming they claimed efficiency of 10 m per Kow hour even if they only hit 70% of their claimed efficiency that’s still 200 180 M of range from 40 kwatt hours those numbers are wild 40ish kwatt hours is the launch variant but
Later on they’ll also offer a 20 60 and nearly 100 KW battery as options at Tera refers to these as the 200 600 and 1,000 M range variants notice also the price the launch price is projected to be only $33,000 any EV can charge from a regular
120 volt wall outlet but it’s painfully slow and it typically e the effective charge rate from a regular wall outlet is 3 maybe 4 mph in the aptera from charging off a regular wall outlet the effective charge rate is more like 10 milph price it’s the most fun you can probably
Have aptera don’t yet know what the rapid charge rate of the production aptera will be but they think it’ll be somewhere between 40 and 60 KW 40 to 60 Kow on any regular EV would be painfully slow for Rapid charging but on the aptera because it’s so efficient that’s
An effective charge rate of 400 to 600 mph the interior I I don’t want to spend much time talking about the interior but it is really cool none of this will make it into production it’ll be very different but this is so interesting this is what’ you say pineapple leather
Yeah or the center console and a weird a net cup holder thing up here and it’s so roomy yeah in terms of like your head room leg room that’s all you know representative and the Yol will will just have tilt right right this one doesn’t but it’ll feel pretty similar to
That too you have all the vision screens so you can really see all around the vehicle tons of Headroom there’s tons of leg room I fit in here perfectly fine as 6’2 you could sleep in the back of this there’s so much room in the back it’s
Amazing I need one of these while a lot of this interior will be different in the production version the climate vent surrounding the main screen and the two rear view displays above the steering column are two elements that will make it to production cost where I live the
Average yearly electricity cost is 10 cents per kilowatt hour driving my Pulstar 2 charged at my home electricity rate cost me about 3 to 4 cents per mile to drive which is already super cheap and an order of magnitude less than comparable combustion vehicles but the
Aptera if I were to charge it at my house would cost me 1 penny per mile and that’s assuming no solar charging at all you factor in solar charging and it becomes less than one penny per mile to drive this car on M electricity rate less than a penny and of course this
Huge efficiency means you don’t need a very big battery to go long distances which reduces cost reduces weight all in making a car this efficient has loads of benefits using the energy you have available is a very good thing also the charge port is back here it’s behind the
License plate this is where it’ll be on the production version too and it will be KNX at launch one of the only downsides of this car being so efficient is that other extra loads like say climate control are going to have a much more noticeable effect on your overall
Efficiency so in the winter these things will probably be a lot lower range just so you’re aware of that in the future you’re probably going to see some clickbaity headlines of EPA has 50% range in the winter because the heater has much more of effect when the rest of
The car doesn’t draw much energy at all making that point even worse at launch for cost and time to Market reasons the aptera will not have a heat pump it’ll have a resistive electric heat it’s fun to toss I should note this is a three- Wheel car but it’s dramatically
More stable than any other three-wheel car I’ve driven if you have stability concerns don’t and because this is a three-wheel vehicle aptera isn’t required to conform to basically any safety regulations but that doesn’t mean they won’t this will get a full Suite of safety features and they are going to
Crash test them even though they’re not required to and it feels so Nimble May perhaps a a little bit dirty but it really feels good now the big question will aptera be able to go into production I don’t know they’ve made a lot of Headway in development the difference between just the alpha
Prototypes and the gamma prototype is staggering I have no doubt in their ability to make an amazing production car but it all depends on funding aptera has their own YouTube channel where they’re very open and honest about progress so go check that out if you want to learn more okay after coming
Home and reviewing the footage that you just watched I was was so positive about aptera that the video came off a little bit like an advertisement so let me be very clear about this I paid my own way to go out to California to make that
Video aptera did not invite me I emailed them and asked them if I could come make that video and they have a referral program I could give you a referral code and get discounts and collect points and stuff but I’m not going to give you any
Of that because I want to make it very clear I have zero Financial incentive to praise anything about the company in fact this video would definitely do better if I spent 15 minutes telling you how stupid the car is but I don’t think it’s stupid I’m very excited for aptera
I really hope they come to Market I really hope they make it a production I’m definitely going to be placing a reservation I want one of these things okay thank you for watching this is so exciting I was oh wow this is a blind spot there is a Nissan Rogue that is
Freaked out to see whatever this is all right and now we shall go oh my God God I love this I’ve been driving it for what a minute I’m going to put in a pre-order after this day I think
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