Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023)

Hey everyone, our team is taking a bit of a break this week. We'll be back shortly with a bunch of new episodes of how I built this and how I built this lab, but in the meantime, we thought we'd bring you this episode about a man who founded a company that is designing and manufacturing a solar powered car. This episode first ran in August of last year. It's a really fascinating story, so if you missed it, stick around, you're gonna want to hear this one for sure. And on with the show. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So when it comes to cars, the internal combustion engine is probably gonna go away over the next 50 years.

Every year, electric cars are getting better and going farther. But you still have to plug them in. So imagine a car that can drive without having to plug it in at all. A car powered by the sun. It's not a new idea, but it's a massively difficult one. In part because you need a lot of energy to power a car. So to solve this problem, a team of engineers in Southern California have designed a solar electric hybrid.

It's a car that can travel up to forty miles simply on sunlight. And the way they've done it is to streamline the design. The car is called the Eptera and it's already available for pre-order. It has three wheels, two seats, and a massive storage area in the back, enough for skis and the surfboard. Steve Fambro is the co-founder. He's been thinking about how to design cars more efficiently for a long time.

He actually started his career back in 2005 as an electrical engineer for a San Diego biotech firm called Illumina. And the idea for Abtera actually came to him while sitting in traffic during his daily commute. I'm just doing what everybody does in in San Diego that works Uh south. Uh you know, you're sitting on the highway, a freeway, uh driving ten to fifteen miles an hour and stop and go traffic. And and I was one of th I was driving a Ford F one fifty pickup truck. I was one of those people I'm like, you know. But it's like

I Use the bed of it twice. Um Before I sold it, but So I'm thinking to myself, you know, I'm

I was also a student pilot at the time, so I was I had an understanding of aerodynamics and um I was just thinking about aerodynamics and planes and looking up at the planes and saying, Oh, the planes are flying by. I'm staying still. You know, um and then look at these vehicles, they're all boxy, even my own, you know, it's just this big Big boxy thing. And so I started doing little things like I would fold my mirrors back.

Uh and or you know, let down my tailgate and try and see on a long trip if I could get more gas mileage. And And then You know, I just did some reading and I said, Wait a minute, the these cars like they're Sixty percent of the energy is just pushing the air out of the way. Right. They're like boxes or fur pieces of furniture pushing air out of the way. They're they're not made for aerodynamics.

So basically You were Just a commuter. Driving a Ford F one fifty. And also you happen to be an i an engineer and you were just

Asking yourself why are cars designed In such a way as to just You know, we Mm-hmm. increase the drag because essentially it means that the Ford F one fifty probably gets like seventeen, twenty miles per gallon, if that.

Yeah. Uh. I mean I'm sure it's better now, yeah. I I At the time I think it was around fourteen miles per gallon and I could I could squeeze out seventeen You know, if I did all these tips and tricks. Yeah. But

Um You know, you could see once you ask the question and see it in The following perspective of basically a continuous lineage from sort of Roman carts to horse and carriages to modern cars. You can see that yeah, four corners, you know, a a wheel under each corner.

And just various manifestations of that. You it's so it it's understandable how none of that would really change. It would just kind of slightly evolve. And um I thought what was needed to be the most efficient was a rethink of the platform. to have the least weight and the least aerodynamic drag possible.

And and just to be clear, you you were just doing this as a tinkerer. This was I mean, you had a full time job And about a company. But but you started to just like draw designs on Paper for fun. Yes, you know, I was uh

m my wife and I at the time Uh we didn't have any children. And so this meant that, you know, Saturday mornings I could lay out my drawings on the living room floor. I could drink coffee all day. I could work in the garage, you know, without distraction. And it was just a hobby, and at some point

I thought you know, I'm probably not the only person That wants this. Um I should I should think about how would I make this and sell it, you know, on have to have a business plan. So I I worked with someone I've never written a business plan, I was an entrepreneur and So I kinda started from there.

And and so I guess around the same time, you in San Diego, you meet this guy, Chris Anthony. And Chris had a c like a a small business where he made boats. Yes, he had a company. uh called epic boats and he he was using these you know, computational fluidynamic tools to make the boat have

More drag as so to make a bigger wake. Uh so you can have more fun. So he's working on the opposite thing. You wanted the boat to be more drug. You're working on something with less drug, but but this was for w wake boarding, basically a a specific type of boat designed to make wakeboarding Mm more fun or more exciting, I guess? Yes. Uh apparently it is a thing. I didn't even know it was a thing. You know, I don't I don't get out much. It's like water skiing on a on like a Like a

Boogie board. Yeah, it's it's kind of like that you have this this wake in perpetuity, you know? Uh that you can sort of surf behind or even uh do wakebo tricks and stuff behind. Um and in Mission Bay here in San Diego, it's uh it's a pretty popular, yeah. Yeah, you hold on to a a rope or a w uh yeah, like like we when when they're uh water skiing. That's right. So he was working on that. So you meet you meet him. He's somebody you feel like I should get to know this guy because he knows how to design

Uh you know, a boat, so maybe I could talk to him about designing my vehicle, whatever it's gonna be. Yeah, you know, we we both are um You know, I had my own shop full of tools, you know, Welder and uh Mini Leave and Yeah, I of course make circuits and things like that as well. So I was pretty handy myself. He was also handy

uh with hand tools and He could Yeah, Chris is a bit of a polymath, you know, so he has many different talents. He's a actually a finance guy by training. But I could see, you know, sort of by inspection, I could see the work that he's done, he's able to uh

m make things that he can visualize, which is a really unique trait. And As we are talking about some of these problems And how we might, you know, build the structure, how it might need to be shaped to carry the load. You know, he could

Easily visualize whereas maybe I would need to do more math. To convince myself of something. All right, so you start talking to Chris and and you and what what did you have in mind at that at that time in terms of what you wanted to do? You you knew you wanted a vehicle that was more energy efficient, and were you thinking like A traditional car where you

W what what kind of designs were you thinking about? Well What size? You know, once I saw what was possible, we we said well let's let's ask uh Let's see what the

You know, like in engineering, oftentimes you'll set a term to zero. You won't know the answer, but you'll set a term in an equation to zero or infinity to kind of see what the equation does. And so I I you know, just sort of asked myself rhetorically, what is what is a

What is a drag shape with you know, a frontal area of X and X is just basically two people sitting side by side. But with with the coefficient of zero, what does that look like? And what does that shape look like? And

Once we determine what that was, uh through our research, you know We We believe that with the diesel engine at the time. we could achieve over three hundred miles per gallon. And so we just we built the company around that and we started fundraising and and got our first investor.

And um you know, it was off to the races. So all right. L let's kinda I'm I'm just curious, I mean About

The decision you made to leave your job. And to start a car company. I mean, it was kind of kind of Uh just I mean when you went to your Your your partner, I think you were married wife at the time, did you say, Hey, I wanna start a car company

And w I mean you had a job and you and this is kind of an ambitious thing to I mean it's not like just starting a you know a farmer's market stand. I mean it requires a lot of capital and a lot of You know, there's a lot, there's a long road to make that work. Wha what what was her reaction? I mean It's very interesting. It's a it's a It's an interesting question and also situation uh for the reasons you just

Yeah. Um I had every reason to stay there. I I would I would have been retired by now from the money I would have made on my stock options. Uh had had I kept them and not liquidated to start at Terra.

Uh my friends at Illumina remind me of that often. Uh but I I remember Once Once I saw that the only way I could do this was

was full time, raise money full time and build the company and I I went home and I told my wife, I said Honey, you know I'm She was like six months pregnant, by the way, our first child and I said, I wanna quit Illumina and um and start a car company. And you know how

Oh, some of the Yeah, every woman I think uh when they go through pregnancy. They have different experiences, some have You know, the bouts of sickness or you know, immense joy and uh my wife was a ladder. She was just

whatever hormones were in her body because of that made her extremely happy. About everything. And so I remember I told her that I'm I'm quitting to start a car company. She's kinda smiled and said, Okay, Hun, that's that's great. I was like, what? Like, did she even hear what I just said, you know?

I don't maybe you shouldn't understand. Um, she's also an electrical engineer and so she had a an appreciation of You know, the challenge ahead. So you and Chris decide to start.

This car company. Call it Aptera, which in in uh it means wingless flight. It's the right in in Greek. More simply wingless, like a pterodactyl. If you say up terra, it's just without wing. Without wings, okay. And Um and you set out to design and I I'll try to uh try to describe it and but maybe you can do a better job. Basically, a three wheeled vehicle, like two wheels in the front.

One in the back. And it's like a it looks like a the the fuselage of a small airplane. Right. Like a m motorcycle car hybrid kind of thing. Yeah, since we're on on

on voice and radio, uh or audio, rather, I'll I'll describe it if you can imagine like uh The shape of a shark. uh maybe flattened out in the middle, but without the fins and then with two wheels in the front of where the mouth is and uh A wheel in the sort of the back where the tail is. That's that's kind of what Aptera looks like. And there's There's actually a lot of biomimicry there because you know, sharks

Other than other fish that swim near the bottom of the uh of the ocean or lake. In what they call ground effect. where you're not in the free stream, but you're down very low to the surface. Those creatures also

Camber. They're back like Aptera. is Cambert. And uh and that radically reduces the the uh the drag coefficient.

So It's it's a A fundamental discovery that uh I made early on in the process is that like this is This is not the free stream. It is this doesn't need to be a symmetrical sort of an airfoil or a teardrop. This needs to look different.

Uh because it is in what they call ground effect. So how did how did you finance building that prototype because you had a prototype within two years. I mean, by two thousand seven you had The first

Vehicle Uh where w how did you uh how did you m finance it? Who who who supported you? Well, our first investor. was uh um uh business incubator in Pasadena called Idea Lab.

Hm. And uh they were instrumental in in getting us off the ground and and connecting us with uh with ongoing funding. And we actually had the first prototype I think within about six months of funding. And it was really just myself, Chris, and a young engineer And we were working, you know, twenty hour days, we were doing all the work ourselves, you know, welding your wiring and everything else. And it was just

Lots and lots of long hours. Um And uh you know, that was just the only way to do it. Uh and then the the sort of production intent version to Mark One we launched um September twenty seventh, I think it was, two thousand seven. And on on the day that we said we would, we around January or so, we uh we told, you know, our board and everyone else this is when we're gonna launch it, and it launched

It launched that day. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Steve about Eptera's early rise and fall, and how he and his co-founder are making another run at solar powered cars today. Stay with us, you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. My guest is Steve Fambrough, founder and CEO of the solar car company Eptera. So It's two thousand six, way before electric vehicles were mainstream, in fact

There was barely an electric vehicle industry at the time. There were no charging standards nothing built for the industry, but Steve was certain he was on the right track. We believe that electric was the future. It made all the sense in the world. We don't need to be burning, you know, hydrocarbons. Even if they're very efficient, uh, there's better ways to power a vehicle and that was with electricity.

Mean You U I mean essentially you had this electric vehicle this prototype and I think you you unveiled it in t to to the public at TED Conference in two thousand seven. And that really got people excited. You got a lot of interest.

Um and you had a lot of uh people coming to you to make investments And um

And people wanted this car. People were really excited about it. Yeah, that was a really big uh that conference was a really pivotal event for us because it it Put us on the map. It got a lot of

Press. introduced us to lots of investors and um we went on to raise probably another forty million dollars or so, um at the time before before we left the company. So all right, so the this prototype comes out, and by the way, it looks like what the car looks like today. It looks very similar, but there is a lot that happened between then and now. Um Um

And so let's talk about some of what happened. I mean there was a a lot of interest you I mean e eventually within a year or so, you had about four thousand people put down deposits to buy Really cool vehicles. Um two seaters, but with a lot of trunk space.

Um and Meantime, you I guess you and Chris, your co founder, decided to find a CEO, like a professional CEO who could really kind of take the company to the next to the next level. for a variety of reasons that will turn out to be m maybe not the right decision. Well you know it w it was a tough time for any start up at that time. Uh I r I remember um Uh

a lot of the the V Cs we were talking to, you know, they were Mm. At that time it was the economic downturn. It was gloom and doom. I still remember uh Bill Gurley uh Prominent. Silicon Valley VC at the time.

A single slide on a PowerPoint with uh A piece of ham where all the ham was gone and a knife. you know, on a bone saying cut to the bone. Uh, that was his advice to all of the startups at the time.

And so you know, we we recognize that the uh that the the team the professional team that we hired They um they were working with the Department of Energy to to get a loan and to bring in a four wheel vehicle and You know with the with the cutting to the bone mentality, you know, we thought maybe the company would be in in better hands if we left it to the professionals and we would go off and start

You know, another company and that's what Chris did and that's what I did. And and basically what what happened if I'm um just to summarize it, I mean the company sought out loans from the government, the Department of Energy, which did give big loans to Tesla and to Fisker and even to Ford, but but initially because you had a three wheeled vehicle you weren't eligible for one of these these loans that were designed to help electric car companies uh get off the ground.

And I guess The the the team that you sort of hired to run the company decided that maybe they should move towards a four wheel wheeled vehicle, like a a traditional sedan. Uh and that's where they kinda shifted all their energy towards.

Yes, that's exactly right. And so uh you know, they had used a lot of the same uh concepts and and uh ideas to to design a four wheel vehicle. I think that's what they were trying to get through the DOE at the time. So essentially by two thousand nine, you and Chris were on the way out. You you you had started this company in two thousand five, but about four years later

There's a professional team, many of whom have had come from the automotive industry. Running Aptera. And I guess You felt like There wasn't much for you to do at that point in in the company.

Yeah, I mean tha that's basically it. You know, we we wanted to Make sure if we're there, you know, getting a salary Uh then we're adding value and moving All moving in the same direction and I think um

you know, the the direction that uh the team and the board wanted to move was the the four wheel and um and the DOE loan and so we felt that We would probably add more value to something new and something different. Uh the professional team was in place and um You know, sort of left left in charge. Alright, so you guys leave. Meantime, Aptera does manage to

to secure a loan, a commitment, I should say. But they had to I guess there was a condition they had to raise Money from the private markets um Um

But for a variety of reasons that fell through and by twenty eleven. the company you founded up terraf it it it uh shut down. It basically liquidated and refunded the depositors money who wanted the people who deposited on the cars and then paid investors back what they could pay them back. That's right.

I mean how did you feel I mean, so th this vi this sort of dream that you guys had That was it. I mean were you how did you You know,

Uh At the time I I tried to channel all of that grief. Like in the st in the positive energy and you know, so I the The day I left. Aptera originally, you know, I was maybe two or three weeks before I had

Yeah, my first signed term sheet for my new company. And I I just tried to put all of that thought And uh grief into energy and momentum. Yeah, into something different. It's you know, it's analogous to the loss of

Of someone that you you love and you never really get over it. H you in the meantime, you were working on this other company this vertical farming company that would allow people, I guess, to raise their own vegetables. Inside their homes or Well it was it was more industrial m food production, but in indoors. But it was uh

The idea of U growing food as densely packed ver in three dimensions as you could, and then uh only expanding it out at the time of harvest so that you could in the smallest amount of space with the least amount of energy and least amount of water. uh raise you know the highest amount of biomass per

Per square. Per unit area, per unit time. Well, Meantime, um Aptera's just done. The the assets were auctioned off. Um apparently uh there was a a Chinese company that you know, uh at some point tried to spin out another like independent company called Aptera US. that sort of would make a gas version of the car never it never really

took off. Um But Since you bought the assets never really file to to

to take over Eptara's IP. Yeah. Yeah, they they didn't really do much of anything with it. Um And I I think even the the company that um

One of the one of the people that bought the assets of the first auction, they ended up with a bunch of the older vehicles uh sitting in a warehouse up somewhere in Northern California, that we've You know, Chris and I've tried to locate just for sentimental reasons, you know, we'd love to have them as part of our heritage just sort of on display or something. Uh, but yeah, they were sort of cast to the four corners of the earth and um the I P the

products and tools and nothing ever really happened with it. And it just kind of uh Sad as an idea in my mind and Chris's mind, um and and Jason and a few others, you know, for Basically until we were able to Bring it back to life. So tell me how that happened. I mean twenty nineteen, you and Chris

join forces to relaunch Aptera. Like tell me about the conversations you were having to do that because I mean you started in two thousand five, it essentially folds in two thousand eleven. And probably most of the investors uh lost money. Right. Um

So tell me how y w w I mean, how did you guys even start talking? Like type me in the conversation, like let's let's start this again. Let's let's go back to this thing. Actually I I think it might have started With our lobbyist Dwayne. Dwayne Gibson, who was in town.

And just you know, wanted to reconnect. And just to be clear, you had a lobbyist that you you hired to work in Washington D C to focus on sub like on on loans and subsidies that the government was offering to electric car makers. Correct.

H it help us navigate the waters, you know. It you when you're connected with someone like that, it's not just about um sort of lobbying for loans and programs. It's also You're making sure you have a seat at the table with uh Uh

different regulatory bodies or that you have the right uh legal oversight, you know, protection in certain regulatory affairs. And so We were just sort of kicking around. The idea saying look, you know that Who is there? There's just Tesla, really, you know, there's no one else. And why is that? And and And everything is just an electrified car. It's not really design

It doesn't appear to be designed from scratch as an electric vehicle and And we You know, Chris Of course, you know, owning this battery company and us talking about it in the numbers and said, Well, you know, with the new technology we could How many batteries could we fit in, you know?

an app tear anyway. And so we just started doing some back of the napkin calculations. And you know, with these new batteries, we could foot a hundred kilowatt hours in that vehicle. And a hundred one hours per mile, which is what we achieved uh with the old app tear about ninety five watt hours per mile, which is extremely efficient. You know, that would be a thousand miles.

And so that kind of just It made our eyes open because we knew from Some little bit of research that we've done. That range was Wasn't demos, but it was a very important factor.

And you know, deciding to buy an electric car or which electric car people wanted to buy. And if you could control the range. Factor. Then you could really control

a significant part of the market. And that was our our premise is how do we how do we blow up range? How do we own range? and we do that with efficiency, and that was really the genesis of the restart. We're gonna take another quick break, but coming up in just a moment, more from Steve about his inspiration to go solar. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to how I built this lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Steve Fanro, the founder of Aptera Motors.

So basically you decide let's make the still make it an electric vehicle, but it'll it'll have solar panels all over it as an additional source of power. Correct. Correct. Like normal if you want, but most people won't ever have to, because here in Southern California You'll probably get about eleven thousand miles a year of free

Charge. Just by leaving it outside. Powered by the sun. That's right. And that'll give it about up to forty miles of range just from solar energy. And that's because this is a Small and efficient.

Vehicle like'cause I I mean I imagine that the the technology around solar just isn't quite there yet to power uh you know a A one ton vehicle. You're right. Uh it's

It's uh You know, you're you're looking at um Twive percent or so conversion efficiency. You know, once it's all sort of encapsulated in a matrix. And uh if you tried to do this, you know, to

Any large. Electric vehicle. It's It's barely gonna budge, you know, the needle. So the

The advantage of designing for efficiency and being a brand that's really grounded in efficiency above all else is that These kind of things become possible. And we can use a smaller battery pack, it's gonna it's gonna mean less cell and less costs for the battery and hopefully a lower lower cost to the consumer. More range, less charge time. You know, et cetera, et cetera. That's our that's the direction that we push stuff. It's it's the

push to more and more efficient using you know Less and less energy along the way. you know, how do we keep reducing the amount of energy that the vehicle uses while expanding the amount that we're producing on the solar panels? Yeah. So let's talk about the car. I mean

Obviously now it's th the the landscape is very different from from two thousand five when you started. It's a different environment you're seeing A lot of you know. model three Teslas all over the United States now, you're seeing a lot of the Kiyas Uh sort of a lower price point you're seeing Obviously Chevy and then the Ford F one fifty, Lightning is out there, the Rivians, you've got

Um a lot of you know a lot of companies, Hyundai are in in the game now, in the electric car game. Um Who is this Four. What is I mean

What Who is this car going to appeal to? It's a different kind of vehicle. It's a two seater And it's uh so w what what part of the market are you targeting? Well, a terror is a brand Yeah, and

The Epter as a product are gonna appeal to people Who want a kind of freedom of of a freedom of mobility, a freedom to go and and To to move without being encumbered either by a charge cord or having to pay for electricity.

Um, you know, that that freedom from the old way of doing things is really what AppTera is about. There's There's lots of electric car choices out there and lots of electrified cars, cars that are just steel boxes with electric components shoved in them. That's those are all great products for different customers and and they'll sell lots of them.

But that's not what we're about. We're about solar mobility. And we're about giving that freedom to people. In the first vehicle that you you see, of course, a two seater, uh that's the tip of the sword, but there's You know, there's a product portfolio. and and vehicles that are coming behind that that are gonna embody the same

ethos and and double down and triple down on efficiency and solar. So, you know, expect to see a family of vehicles from Aptera where this is a first, but all of them are gonna have the same promise of kind of solar freedom and solar mobility. So I think the majority of daily commutes are are under like forty miles. So In theory, right, if you're just driving a couple miles to the office, maybe the grocery store and home and you know, like solar power alone could power the car.

But what about parts of the country where it's not as sunny or on days when it's not sunny at all, does the car store the solar power, the the solar energy? Yes, it'll it'll still charge. It might It might only charge, you know. ten miles worth or twelve miles worth or something like that. If it's

overcast or in a northern latitude, you know. Uh and so the way to think about it is You know, are you are you plugging it in? Once every six months? Are you plugging it in once every month? You know, that that's how it's gonna impact people. It it's whether you get thirty miles a day, forty miles a day the launch vehicle's gonna get around four hundred miles range.

Um, it's really just gonna affect are you plugging it in monthly? Or maybe. Every two weeks or or something like that. So that that's how that difference in Daily solar charge is gonna manifest. Um you

also are uh I mean the the the body of the car is is different. It's a it's a carbon fiber Yeah. And so um I I mean it kinda looks like you know, there there are these like velo racing bicycles, right? It it's almost like this aerodynamic like um I mean teardrop isn't the right description as you as you said earlier, but it's it's sort of like that.

Um I i is that also I mean does that also enable it to Does it does that enable the range? I mean the the the weight of the material, for example? Well it is a combination of both. The the drag, the low drag, which You know, the shape.

Yeah. Shark like shape. Uh and the lightweight is Both of those are what really enable the efficiency. And the lightweight comes from composites. Now the challenge with composites and the challenge with how we were doing them before and how Chris was doing with his boat company is very labor intensive and it doesn't really scale. And so what we wanted was a process that we could

stamp them out like you would stamp out steel pieces. uh and produce them as fast as you would a steel car. And uh that's that's what took us to Italy to C P C. Our our partners have have devised a A very high throughput process. uh which to my knowledge no one else in the world has this this capacity and this ability uh to produce parts every, you know, four to six minutes.

Uh just like you were producing a steel park. So it it's a strong uh composite thermoplastic, but without without any of the hand labor and with the waste and the cutting and the materials and all that other stuff, it's just produces a nice Part

That comes right out of the mold, ready to be vinyl wrapped or um Or just used without having to paint. It's it's a radically different way of producing the vehicle. There's only six structural pieces. And so being able to to build a vehicle from six pieces is just an order of magnitude simplification of tooling fixtures, et cetera. So um

The idea is to get these I I know that that you can now order you can reserve one, right? I mean there's there's r th you've have uh I guess up to about forty thousand people have reserved one. And The idea is to start delivering them when? It's about forty three thousand. uh reservations about one point six billion dollars worth of vehicles. Um We believe

We're pretty confident. After about nine months of of closing our series B funding, somewhere between nine and twelve months, we could deliver the first vehicle. You know, we still have lots of big things to do. We have to go through our airbag certification program, for example. We have to go through the you know, the ABS uh the ABS Breaking System certification. Uh, for those that may not know, you know, you can't just order

that part and install it on the vehicle, it has to go through the The manufacturer's own sort of certification process. So there's some things like that that we still have to do. And that's that's why we're fundraising the series B. And what about the the the sort of the safety of the vehicle? I mean it is

It's it's an enclosed vehicle, but it is three wheels and it's two seater and uh and so I mean obviously a motorcycle is uh not the safest um mode of transportation. But but this has airbags, presumably, I mean it has all the safety features of a car. Yeah. Uh you can think of it just as a a a modern a modern car in terms of safety features, you know, of the

Roll over the crush strength, airbags, seat belts, uh interlocks, all that kind of stuff. Same same stuff we have. designed to the same standards. Um so not required for a motorcycle. But Yeah, we're just

Trying to um adhere to as many of the regular automotive standards uh that we can as we can. And and the price point starts at about twenty six thousand dollars, I think. Yeah, right. Which is uh the smallest battery pack, uh twenty twenty five kilowatt hour. And um it goes up to, you know, around fifty thousand I think for the highest configuration.

uh thousand mile range three wheel drive. So the options are basically battery pack size. And do you want two wheel drive or three wheel drive. Those are the the big cost drivers. Um I mean. What do you like in in terms of of solar technology, right? There are some companies, including Fisker, which is is coming back, right? It was sort of went away for a while and it's coming back.

they're also uh yeah, they're also experimenting or will be experimenting with solar Um hybri so I guess you call it solar hybrid, like solar electric hybrid maybe. Um what kinds of leaps in solar technology have to happen for a car to be fully

Solar Uh solar powered. If the solar is gonna be meaningful on the vehicle. If it's gonna add a meaningful range. The vehicle's gonna have to be aerodynamic, right? It can't just be a boxy flat sided vehicle.

So if it's gonna be aerodynamic, it means you're gonna have curves in 3D. So fundamentally you're gonna be making three D curve panels. So that's number one. How do you bend those cells without cracking? Or micro cracking, which will lead to a crack. And how do you do it repeatedly? Um inconsistently.

And then also make that panel very lightweight for an automotive application, and then also make it affordable. And also make it able to stand up to hail and rocks. That's what's required to make it practical. And uh that's what we've been doing for the past two years. So I mean

Uh looking ahead. five years from now when there's lots of Apteras driving down the freeway, up and down the freeways al at least in California and maybe beyond fr from what you know and from your perspective. I mean are we looking at a A a future Sooner than we may think of of electric vehicles.

Going a thousand plus miles on one charge? I definitely think so. I I think uh Eptera's gonna show the way because of the way technology is right now, m it's there's no other way it's achievable. Without This extreme

Obsession. with efficiency. There's no other platform out there that could do it. So The the vehicles, the the race for the high range, which I think is gonna be the new era

uh that you see unfolding. you know, in EVs, when you look at where the innovations, the innovations are how do we get more range, I think you're going to see some common trends of aerodynamic shapes, lighter weight materials. And um hopefully Aptera can maintain its lead in in that position. I have to assume you're gonna be one of the first owners of and of the Apptera. When will you be driving one around? I drive

The prototypes here all the time, but I I want to drive a production version. Yeah. Uh so I'll have to fight probably Chris and a couple of other investors for the very first one. Sounds like there's gonna be a little bit of a fight. Yeah, I've I've learned not to uh you know, try and arm rustle him or fight him. I usually end up, you know, the doctor's office if I do that. So Um, by the way, I I noticed that it has rear view mirrors, which presumably affects drag. I think that's a regulatory thing in the US, right? Because you can replace rear view mirrors with cameras

Right, but the US uh but the regulatory still require a rear view mirror. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's vestigial. It's like saying, you know, you must have a clip for your your whip on your buggy, you know. You can't have your whip laying around in the buggy. Like there's no whip, there's no buggy, you know, we don't need that. Uh but it is a vestigial requirement. Um so we have the least amount of size required by law. Got it.

And the doors open electronically or what?'Cause they open like wings. Yeah, there's there's uh electric and mechanical release. So there's a um the most common way to do it is with a button that's right there on the armrest, but then there's sort of a a back up mechanical release underneath it, which many E Vs have that that strategy now. And and um but you can only fit two people. You can't fit More than that, but it has a lot of cargo space. Yeah, thousand liters of cargo space, which is um like Is a comparison.

You know, any modern E V that's out there, you you fold down the back seats and you get a thousand liters of space or or or more in the Aptera. Uh so it it's a I mean you can put surfboards in it, you can put a ladder in there, tools, you can put um you know, if you're like a um a Macedonian army reenactment person, you can put all your spears and stuff in there as well. I mean it's it's an amazing amount of space. Huh.

Well. That's a huge market. Apparently a lot of Macedonian uh reenactors out there. So that's a that's a huge huge market. Yeah, we're gonna be big in that market. That's Steve Fambro, co-founder and co-CEO. Terra Motors.

Thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please make sure to follow the show wherever you listen on any podcast app. Usually there's just a follow button right at the top, so you don't miss any new episodes and it is entirely free. If you want to contact our team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramteen Arabloui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, Casey Herman. JC Howard, Carla Esteves, Liz Metzger, and Sam Paulsen. Viva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening.

How I built this.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.