Slashdot Mirror
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.
Goatse alert.
This is just the latest Corbin Sparrow, and the sparrow failed. This failed again. Whee!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not talking about batteries in an electric car. I am talking about sexy concept cars with small wheels, low clearance and no weight trying to drive through a few inches of wet snow and ice.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The Aptera looks like it does for a reason - its primary goal is efficiency, which is how they got over 200 MPG.
But to do that, they had to not waste energy pushing the car through the air. So they made it aerodynamic, so it looks like an airplane rather than the traditional "box on wheels." And their initial target was a two seater, which is most efficient (because most driving is 1-2 people, and with a two seater you're pushing around less mass).
A year ago (apparently) marketplace realities kicked in. That is, while sedans are less efficient, people prefer buying them because it's useful to be able to carry more people when you need to. So the marketplace for sedans is much larger than two seaters, making it a much smarter business to be in. But since they didn't get their funding, we'll never know how that would have played out.
Though I would love to see what a truly efficient sedan might look like.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Solyndra's investors weren't particularly Obama donors - the Waltons (i.e. Walmart) were major investors, and they're hardly Obama fans. Keep in mind also that Solyndra was started and was fast-tracked for funding under a DOE program started under Bush, and Obama's [ep[;e actually slowed things down, did more due diligence, and put more protections in place around the loans that ended up saving us money by pulling the plug on the company. Despite Issa's partisan spinning, this isn't something to blame Obama on - any time the government sets up a fund to promote businesses, some of those businesses will succeed and some will fail, and Solyndra failed because China radically dropped the price of solar cells, wiping out Solyndra's market. The real problem isn't that the US government set up a fund to encourage solar development, it's that the US started years later than China, and with a much lower level of investment, so China is beating us. The answer isn't to give up, it's to compete harder.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
It was not "fast-tracked" for funding under Bush. The Solyndra loan was put on hold by the Bush Administration (at least partly because they were not going to be able to complete evaluation before the transition and therefore left it for the new Administration to reach a decision). The Obama Administration may have put more "due diligence" in place, but they then made a decision before that "due diligence" was completed. Somebody from the DOE predicted that Solyndra would go bankrupt in September of 2011 before the DOE renegotiated the loan guarantees so that the investors would get paid first, then, what do you know, Solyndra went bankrupt in September 2011. The Administration is trying to claim that the email predicting the bankruptcy was talking about something else, but this is the same Administration that claims upper levels of the Administration were unaware of Project Fast & Furious when they were making speeches touting the program.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison