My family and I visited the Aptera factory in Carlsbad, California.
Yours truly was given a ride on one of the prototype vehicles as were my family members. Have a look.
As it happened we were there when the crate for the first body in carbon arrived from Italy. (The same firm produces the body for Ferrari and Lamborghini. Italy, I think it’s fair to say, needs Aptera to work, especially as climate change and high interest rates affects the future of super cars.)
The Aptera staff had a barbecue and we joined in and went on a tour of the factory led by the two cofounders.
To be honest I didn’t quite know what to think despite being an investor in Aptera through a Special Purpose Vehicle earlier last year.
To my mind the real innovation of the company is its solar panel portfolio of patents. No less an authority than Ernest & Young evaluated the patents to be worth $130m and it’s easy to see why.
Much of the betting against electric vehicles rests on mistaken assumptions if not outright misbehavior on the part of petrostates.
The first wrong assumption is that customers want Cyber Trucks or Rivians or the electric Ford 150. Such cars are clearly not as interesting or affordable to the customer.
These electric trucks simply require too many rare earths per passenger mile.
This might have worked in a Trump or Obama presidency but that was before we knew the scale of transnational organized crime affecting mining throughout subsaharan Africa. It’s not a recipe for the future.
Ivanhoe CEO Robert Friedland’s assessment of copper should be taken seriously here. It’ll soon be a national security imperative that electric cars minimize the use of scarce rare earths.
It’s doubtful many of the other car companies take serious minimizing the use of copper as much as Aptera does. None take seriously reducing the use of aluminum or steel. Or the right to repair. Or how to minimize parts.
Nor does it seem likely that the much heavier EVs will pass muster when it becomes even more apparent how often car bloat kills pedestrians. How long before the Department of Transportation moves here? Or is Mayor Pete Buttigieg too compromised?
The end of Elon — which I long ago called in July ‘22 — seems finally at hand. By now it’s pretty obvious that Elon was committing stock fraud with Lex Friedman and the self-driving car fiasco. Hence the relationship with effective altruist conman Igor Kurganov, the Russian poker player.
By concentrating the American electric automative industry with one person — a person who is a naturalized American — one gets the sense that China had a way of learning about what worked — and didn’t work — from their spying on Elon. You can think of Elon’s successes as a sort of Chimerica view of the world. As time has gone on, however, he’s become too Israeli and too Russian to be allowed to operate much longer. To be sure the United States loves using Elon to run their own ops but not with its stock price as it is.
China’s BYD cars may well be blocked from the Western markets but their cheapness will prove irresistible to much of the developing world and this will, in turn, give Beijing an element of soft power. The only story China has right now is these super cheap cars. They’ll do everything they can to protect and expand it.
The only solution I see is to produce our own electric Model-T equivalent — a car like the Aptera. Such a solar powered car would well take over the global South where the sun shines brightly.
Densification increases the likelihood of solar mobility too. You could imagine e-bikes and mass transit covering the land. I’d be interested in licensing some of Aptera’s patents to build solar powered e-bikes for the European or North American markets.
American policymakers know well that we can’t be installing these charging stations everywhere without having a serious effect on the grid. You could think of school buses or postal fleets having solar panels on their roofs. This’ll drastically reduce the need for copper.
As the costs of solar panels gets cheaper the question of how to convert cars between these two worlds will be interesting. You could even imagine a future where there’s a sort of cash for clunkers app where philanthropists or even the government go out and buy polluting internal combustion cars out in the wild.
Protecting from attacks on the grid. All the features of charging stations are useless if the grid goes down. The Israelis/Russians/Chinese are becoming expert in shutting down our grid, especially given how much of that infrastructure has been built on Microsoft’s products, products which are notoriously leaky.
You can think of all the crypto and AI centers as a tax on our global public grid infrastructure. Bill Gates and Microsoft are being shut out of cloud contracts so there’s really nowhere else to go. For what it’s worth it’s my contention that Gates is the quiet founder of OpenAI. His decision to spy on his users doesn’t look good for him and definitely won’t portend well for the future.
This demand for more and more power will drive increased natural gas use — as The Financial Times has already noted. Sam Altman himself admits that there’ll be a need for an energy transformation, likely led by his nuclear energy startup (which has its own problems).
Or, and this is more menacing, more focus on uranium, which is heavily controlled by the Russian federation. (Oh, you still think that conversation with Russian-aligned Jeffrey Epstein was just about bridge playing, did you? I’m sure all those Swiss people around Bill Gates were also not at all tied into the Russian world.)
You should definitely read The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, which was published last year.
I am categorically opposed to the nuclear powered future. And so is the American deep state.
Aptera is anti-inflationary.
I bought a 2012 Honda Fit. The car now has 140,000 miles on it and I drive it when I’m in Southern California. The car has since been discontinued which is a shame because I loved them.
Ignoring a commuter car has been the failure for Detroit now for a number of years. For a lot of dealerships the way they make money is on fixing your car. Aptera threatens to reduce those needs considerably.
What about the look?
In my view cars should look like the future. Yes, it looks like something out of the Jetsons. In the new futuristic J. Lo Netflix film there’s even a flying Aptera.
I believe that things can — and should be — viral in the real world once you see them.
The Dyson vacuum cleaner is visually striking. It doesn’t look like a vacuum cleaner but once you see it you can’t get it out of your head. That’s true of Aptera too.
I tend to prefer investments which look compelling too. Like any work of art it’s a conversation starter.
To be sure I don’t think we’ve thought through enough what the world would look like if everyone drove a solar-powered car. What would we do, say, with all the gas stations?
If my numbers are correct, a car that size would require approx 35000 Watts to sustain 70mph on the highway. If those solar panels worked at 100% efficiency (typ is 17%) then it would take a few days to charge the car for a 30 minute ride.
What is the sales pitch for this company? I can see it being very convenient for city folk with short commutes but not for the average person.
We would continue to convert them into convenience stores...