Chuck Squatriglia of Wired has driven the three-wheel, two-seat, electric Aptera and says it’s a real car:
The 2e is about the size of a Honda Civic on the outside and a Honda CRX on the inside. It seats two people in relative comfort and has enough room to haul three sets of golf clubs or 22 bags of groceries. Wilbur [the president and CEO of Aptera Motors] knows this because he loaded that many in there himself.Downtown San Francisco is no place to see what a car can do, especially when a nervous chief marketing officer keeps telling you you’re driving a $1 million prototype. But the 2e reminded us a lot of a Civic in terms of acceleration and handling. The accelerator pedal has a lot of travel and it takes getting used to, but once you punch it, the car moves with authority. The ride was a bit stiff and there’s no power steering, but the 1,700-pound car was nimble in traffic.
The 2e doesn’t have a transmission; power flows from the motor directly to the front wheels. A knob on the dash lets you select from three driving modes. D1 limits output to maximize range. D2 is for normal driving. D3 offers brisker acceleration. Wilbur says the 2e will do zero to 60 in “under 10 seconds,” which is on par with the Civic and Toyota Yaris, and says it tops out at 90 mph. He claims the car “handles like a bat out of hell.”
“It’s got no lean,” Wilbur said. “It’s completely flat.”Wilbur was coy about the 2e’s specs because they’re still working on the car, so all we can tell you is it has a 13-kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery. Plug it in to a standard 110-volt, 10-ampere outlet and it’ll recharge “overnight.” Up that to a 220-volt, 30-ampere outlet and you’re good to go in four hours. Wilbur says the battery is good for 100 miles with two people, 250 pounds of stuff and the AC going full blast.
“We’re guaranteeing 100 miles of range,” he said. He figures the battery has a useful life of six years, at which point Aptera may offer them to solar- and wind-power generators for energy storage.
As for the looks, well, you’ll either love it or hate it. The 2e doesn’t place form over function, form is function. Everything about it was designed to maximize efficiency and squeeze every mile possible from the battery. Aerodynamics is key to that, Wilbur said, because 50 percent of the power a car uses at 55 mph is needed to push the air aside. Reduce drag and you reduce your energy needs.
Wilbur says the engineers considered making the 2e a conventional four-wheeler but scrapped the idea because the added weight and rolling resistance killed efficiency. “We lost 34 percent,” he said. “To recover that, the car would need a battery 50 percent bigger.”
That slick body is made of a proprietary honeycomb composite material, and Wilbur claims it’s six times stronger than steel. The 2e is currently undergoing crash testing, but Wilbur says it exceeds federal side-impact and roof-crush standards.
We won’t see a production model for another couple of months. It will be a little more square when viewed from the front, a concession made to increase interior room and allow the windows to roll down. That’s a smart move, because the car we drove could be called “cozy” and the windows don’t open.
The engineers have reworked the battery pack, which is located in a sealed compartment under the seats, to move it forward and shift the center of gravity toward the front. Wilbur says the production car carries 70 percent of its weight on the front wheels, which “is excellent for traction and handling.” They also brought the front wheels eight inches closer to the body and raised the ride height a bit.
Despite the tweaks, the car became more aerodynamic, and Wilbur says the production car will have a drag coefficient of 0.15. That will make the 2e the most aerodynamic production car in history, topping even the General Motors EV1.
Aptera plans to start production by the fourth quarter and says the car will have a list price between $25,000 and “the low 40s.” Something more specific will be nailed down once the company gets closer to the launch date, Wilbur says. As for what it’ll cost to drive, Wilbur says you’re looking at about a 1.5 cents a mile.
A list price between $25,000 and “the low 40s”? That’s quite a confidence interval.