Aptera Announces US-Wide Repair Network for Its Upcoming Solar Electric Car (electrek.co) 27
Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek:
We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on their vehicles, especially those from a small company... So to waylay those fears, Aptera announced a partnership today that unlocks access to 4,300 service shops across the US, through a company called RepairPal. Aptera had been working on this partnership when we saw them at our factory tour, but today they're ready to officially announce it.
RepairPal doesn't own its own shops, but instead certifies local shops to work on particular models of car... All shops will get access to Aptera-specific service procedures.
RepairPal doesn't own its own shops, but instead certifies local shops to work on particular models of car... All shops will get access to Aptera-specific service procedures.
Reservation tip: save with a referral link (Score:2)
If the idea of a free-power-from-the-sun car with open repair instructions interests you, you should place a refundable reservation. Lots of people have referral links to save $30 off the already low referral fee. My referral page is here, for example: https://frequal.com/aptera/res... [frequal.com]
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Spam.
Yeah... but interesting (and even potentially useful) spam. They are really cool vehicles [aptera.us]; I'd want one even if they weren't solar.
Of course, the company has been promising them for years...
TESLA failed too (Score:2)
Tesla was given a massive US government bail out and subsidies.
Aptera was forbidden because Joe Manchin (oil/coal guy) fought hard to ban 2-3 wheel EVs and compromised watered down US modernization efforts. Aptera couldn't get ANY help that GM and Tesla received so they went bankrupt. It took all this time to come back again and then the Pandemic... Now it's going to be another depression hopefully not before they can get a foothold and enough guts to move to a successful country before they go under agai
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Overheard (Score:2)
Mechanic: "Sorry, sir, that is the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM charging speed from its solar panels"
Customer: "That's shit. It means the solar panels are basically pointless."
Mechanic and everyone else: "Yep"
Re:Overheard (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing as the average American drives less than 40 miles in a day (Europeans are even lower), that amount of solar power is perfect. For almost everyone, you could charge it to full once and then subsist almost completely on solar to recharge the daily usage.
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The average American drives 37 miles per day. Adding 5 miles per day of range means barely an eighth of the power gets replaced every day. And that 5 miles per day of charging adds weight; chances are, it doesn't break even for the extra weight. There's a good reason nobody else puts solar panels on cars. If it were a good idea, or even a not-complete-harebrained idea, Tesla would have done it years ago.
Re:Overheard (Score:5, Informative)
It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.
I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.
Also:
1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.
2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.
3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.
4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).
5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).
But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.
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The car DC fast charges faster than anybody in the USA. You don't need the solar.
The CEO said that offering a solar free car wasn't worth it because the cost savings are negligible and it pays for itself right away. You have to pay to cover the car in SOMETHING and the solar isn't a lot more money; plus it actively does something... which is enough to make a difference.
If it did nothing, it would be a useful marketing gimmick... like we don't spend more money on rear spoilers and other BS to sell cars..
The
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The problem is the energy produced by a solar panel on a car is really low. It's likely not even worth the added cost. Sure, solar cells are cheap, but boxy cars are something we left behind in the 70s. You could go all fancy with flexible cells, but their efficiency is even worse.
In the end, the energy collected from this is even less than a level 1 charger. And many people can't fathom that an EV on a level 1 charger is even practical (for a lot of use cases, it is).
A level 1 charger can charge 3-5 miles
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You don't seem to realize that this car has the lowest drag coefficient of a land vehicle. Your side mirrors are as bad as this whole car. They began working on this decades go using a GAS engine, it was not an EV!
It's so great that SOLAR can drive it 45 miles per day but that was not the purpose of making the most efficient car ever. You can have smaller batteries which means they charge faster and it costs less to charge it; a side benefit is bugs don't go splat so it doesn't need as much cleaning. The
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Start putting roofs on parking lots and then putting solar panels on those.
Yeah. And who's paying to do all that work? Assuming it can actually be pulled off everywhere (it can't).
Re: Overheard (Score:1)
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Good luck convincing the owners of the parking lots to pay for it.
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Oh, thanks. I misread per hour as per day. But at 5 miles per hour, you won't get 40 miles per day. IIRC, the full-sun-equivalent hours in the U.S. varies from about 2.5 to about 6 or so. You won't get the equivalent of eight hours of sun unless you're smack in the middle of the Mojave desert with no mountains nearby on a dry day. So depending on where you are, you will get anywhere from 12.5 miles per day to 30 miles per day.
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Except that the average American wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looks like an exhibit from Epcot. It's been known for quite awhile that you can make an extremely efficient vehicle by making it smaller and more aerodynamic, but at the extreme edge of that design philosophy, the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.
As to the solar aspect, what problem are they trying to solve that we couldn't just adequately remedy by running wires to the places people park more traditionall
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And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)
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Except that the average American wouldn't be caught dead in a car that looks like an exhibit from Epcot.
I bet you could convince a lot of them. Especially non-families and those who only drive a little around town. I could buy Honda Civic Hybrid, which still requires gas, or I could get an Aptera for the same price and never pay for gas and almost never pay for electricity to charge it. I'll take the Aptera. It's a better value all around. I can take the Aptera camping and it'll be useful; a Civic Hybrid would be useless other that getting me there.
As to the solar aspect, what problem are they trying to solve that we couldn't just adequately remedy by running wires to the places people park more traditionally designed EVs?
Exactly that. We've been running wires for more EV charging o
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While you probably wouldn't want this as a daily driver for many other reasons, solar panels on cars make sense. 5 MPH or even less isn't much, but it's not nothing, and it's basically free. The car already has a DC charger on-board, so the added cost isn't much, and cars spend most of their time parked, usually outdoors.
The original Nissan Leaf had a small solar panel option that charged the 12V battery. That is a good idea. EVs obviously don't need cranking power for an ICE, but they do need 12V for basic
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I've learned not to expect much out of Aptera, they've been at this two decades of "just about to launch" and never getting anywhere.
That said, if something did charge at 5mph from integrated solar, well that's on par with level 1 EV charging and some folks get by on that. So going to work and parking in the parking lot might get the morning commute replenished over the day, maybe some of the return trip. For some lightly driven vehicles, they might almost never plug in, in that hypothetical.
It's Not Terrible (Score:2)
As electric scooters go, it's not terrible.
It's better looking than the Renault Twizy. I guess. If you squint.
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Already done.
They created a classification called "autocycle" specifically for this new type of car. Even Canada has it.
Mute point..they haven't made it into production (Score:2)
Same as slate? (Score:2)
Isn’t RepairPal also Slate’s path to support? If so, this may be a good direction for the industry in that a big barrier to entry for new vehicles has been dealers and service. Dealers are sadly mostly a BadThing, but service and parts are big deals.
Raising the signal/noise on Aptera (Score:1)
There's a lot of misinformation and FUD about Aptera on social media. To raise the signal/noise ratio...
Aptera is currently in their validation phase, immediately preceding production of their "Launch Edition" vehicle. They've built five out of ten validation vehicles, named "Atlas" with mostly production parts, including some "first article" (preceding production) parts. In addition, they've rebuilt one of their earlier (pre-validation) vehicles, named "Artemis", to nearly the same spec as their Atlas vali