How I Built This with Guy Raz - Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

There’s a new car coming to market that will probably make its owners search out the sunniest spots in the parking lot...Aptera Motors is designing and manufacturing this car: a plug-in electric hybrid that can run up to 40 miles on a single, solar-powered charge. This week on How I Built This Lab, Steve Fambro shares how he and his co-CEO revived their once-defunct auto company thanks to the promise of solar energy. Plus, Steve’s take on why today’s vehicles require so much energy, and how Aptera’s novel design could change the way we think about cars forever...This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. 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 going to 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 40 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 Eptera actually came to him while sitting in traffic during his daily. commute. I was doing what everybody does in San Diego that works south. You know, you're sitting on the highway, a freeway, driving 10 to 15 miles an hour and stop and go traffic. And I was one of, I was driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck. I was one of those people. I'm like, you know. I think it's a

best selling car in the U.S. It is. It's amazing how that is, you know, but it's like I used the bed of it twice before I sold it. But so I'm thinking to myself, you know, I was also a student. I was also a pilot at the time. So I had an understanding of aerodynamics. And I was just thinking about aerodynamics and planes and looking up at the planes and saying, you know, the planes are flying by. I'm staying still, you know, 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 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. And, you know, I just did. And, you know, I just did. And, you know, I just did. And, you know, you know, I just some reading. And I said, wait a minute, these cars, like, 60% of the energy is just pushing the air out of the way. They're like boxes or pieces of furniture pushing air out of the way. They're not made for aerodynamics. So basically, you were just a commuter driving a Ford F-150, and also you happen to be an engineer. And you were just asking yourself, why are cars designed in such a way as to just, you know, you, you know, you.

increase the drag because essentially it means that you got a Florida F1 50 probably gets like 17, 20 miles per gallon, if that. I mean, I'm sure it's better now. Yeah. At the time, I think it was around 14 miles per gallon and I could squeeze out 17, you know, if I did all these tips and tricks.

Yeah. But, you know, you could see, once you ask a question and see it in the following perspective of basically a continuous lineage from sort of Roman cart. to horse and carriages to modern cars, you can see that, yeah, four corners, you know, a wheel under each corner, and just various manifestations of that.

And so it's understandable how none of that would really change. It would just kind of slightly evolve. And 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 just to be clear, you were just doing this as a tinkerer. I mean, you had a full-time job at a boutique company, but you started to just like draw designs on paper for fun? Yes. You know, I was my wife and I at the time, 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. I should think about how would I make this and sell it, you know, I have to have a business plan. So I worked with someone. I've never written a business plan.

I was an entrepreneur. And so I guess around the same time, you in San Diego, you meet this guy, Chris Anthony. And Chris had like a small business where he made boats. Yes, he had a company called Epic Boats, and he was using these computational fluid dynamic tools to make the boat have more drag, so to make a bigger wake. So he's working on the opposite thing. He wanted the boat to have more drag. You're working on something with less drag. But this was for wakeboarding, basically a specific type of boat designed to make wakeboarding more fun or more exciting, I guess.

Yes, apparently it is a thing. I didn't even know it was a thing. I don't get out much. It's like water skiing on like a boogie board. Wakeboard is going to kill me for saying that, but it's sort of like that. Yeah, it's kind of like that. You have this wake in perpetuity, you know, that you can sort of surf behind or even do wakeboard tricks and stuff behind. And in Mission Bay here in San Diego, it's pretty popular, yeah. Yeah, you hold onto a rope or, yeah, like when you're, when you're, 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, you know, a boat. So maybe I can talk to him

about designing my vehicle, whatever it's going to be. Yeah, you know, we both are, you know, I had my own shop full of tools, you know, welder and mini-lath and, you know, I, of course, make circuits and things like that as well. So I was pretty handy myself. He was also handy with hand tools and he could Chris is a bit of a polymath you know so he has many different talents he's 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 make things that he can visualize which is really unique trait and as we are talking about some of these problems and how we might you know build the structure

or 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 what did you have in mind at that time in terms of what you wanted to do? You knew you wanted a vehicle that was more energy efficient. And were you thinking like a traditional car? What kind of designs were you thinking about? Well, once I saw what was possible, and we said, well, let's ask, 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 ask 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 the coefficient of zero, what does that look like? And what does that shape look like? And once we determine what that was through our research, you know, we believe that with the diesel engine at the time, we could achieve over 300 miles per gallon. And so we just, we built the company around that and we started fundraising and got our first investor. And, you know, it was off to the races. So, all right. Let's kind of, 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, let's just be on. Be blondes.

Kind of nuts, right? I mean, when you went to your partner, I think you were married, your wife at the time, did you say, hey, I want to start a car company. And, I mean, you had a job and you, and this is kind of an ambitious thing. 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. What was her reaction? I mean, it's very interesting.

It's an interesting question and also situation for the reasons you just said. I had every reason to stay there. I would have been retired by now from the money I would have made on my stock options. had I kept them and not liquidated to start at Terra. My friends at Illumina remind me of that often. But I remember once I saw that the only way I could do this was full-time, raised money full-time and built the company. And I went home and I told my wife, I said, honey, you know,

she was like six months pregnant, by the way, our first child. Wow. I said, I want to quit Illumina and start a car company. And you know how some, you know, every woman, I think, when they go through pregnancy, they have different experiences. Some have, you know, bouts of sickness or, you know, immense joy. And my wife was the latter. 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 quitting to start a car company. She's kind of smiled and said, okay, hon, that's great. I was like, what? Did she even hear what I just said? You know, I don't, maybe she didn't understand. She's also electrical engineer, and so she had an appreciation of, you know, the challenge ahead. So you and Chris decide to start this car company, called it Aptera, which it means wingless flight. It's like, right, in Greek.

Or I guess more simply wingless, like a pterodactyl. If you say Aptera, it's just without wing. Without wings. Okay. And you set out to design, and I'll try to describe it, 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 it looks like the fuselage of a small airplane, right? It's like a motorcycle car hybrid kind of thing. Yes, if you can, you know, since we're on voice and radio, or audio, rather, I'll describe it.

If you can imagine like the shape of a shark, maybe flattened out in the middle, but without the fins, and then with two wheels in the front of where the mouth is and a wheel in sort of the back where the tail is, that's kind of what Aptera looks like. And there's actually a lot of biomimicry there because sharks, other fish that swim near the bottom of the ocean or a 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 their back, like Aptera is cambered. And that radically reduces the drag coefficient. So it's a fundamental discovery that I made early on in the process. Like this is, this is not the free stream. This doesn't need to be a symmetrical sort of an airfoil or a tear drop, this needs to look different because it isn't what they call ground effect. So how did you finance building that prototype?

Because you had a prototype within two years. I mean, by 2007, you had the first vehicle. How did you finance it? Who supported you? Well, our first investor was a business incubator in Pasadena called Idealab. And they were instrumental in getting us off the ground and connecting us 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, 20-hour days. We were doing all the work ourselves, you know, welding, wiring, and everything else. And it was just lots of, lots of long hours. And, you know, that was just the only way to do it. And then the sort of production intent version, the Mark I, we launched September 27th, I think it was, 2007. And on the day that we said we would, around January or so, we told, you know, our board and everyone else, this is when we're going to launch it. And it launched that day. We're going to take a quick break.

but when we come back, more from Steve about Aetara'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. One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app. And it's totally free.

Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Steve Fambrough, founder and CEO of the series. solar car company, Aptera. So it's 2006, 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 hydrocarbons, even if they're very efficient. There's better ways to power a vehicle,

and that was with electricity. I mean, you, I mean, essentially, you had this electric vehicle, this prototype. And I think you unveiled it to the public, a TED conference in 2007. And that really got people excited. You got a lot of interest. And you had a lot of people coming to you to make investments. And people wanted this car. People were really excited about it.

Yeah, that was a really big, that conference was a really pivotal event for us because it put us on the map. It got a lot of press. It introduced us to lots of investors. And we went on to raise probably another $40 million or so at the time before we left the company. So, all right, so this prototype comes out. And by the way, it looks like what the car looks like today. very similar. But there's a lot that happened between then and now. And so let's talk about some of what happened. I mean, there was a lot of interest. I mean, eventually within a year or so,

you had about 4,000 people put down deposits to buy one of these really cool vehicles, two-seaters, but with a lot of trunk space. And meantime, you, I guess you had 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, but for a variety of reasons that would turn out to be maybe not the right decision. Well, you know, it was a tough time for any startup at that time. I remember a lot of the VCs we were talking to, you know, they were at that time, it was an economic downturn.

There was gloom and doom. I still remember Bill Gurley, a prominent solicit. Silicon Valley v.C. at the time. Fested in Uber and many others, yeah. I remember he had a single slide on a PowerPoint with sort of a piece of ham where all the ham was gone and a knife, you know, on a bone saying cut to the bone. That was his advice to all of the startups at the time. And so, you know, we recognize that the team, the professional team that we hired,

they were working with the Department of Energy to get alone 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 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 basically what happened if I'm 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 initially, because you, you know, you know, the company sought out loans from the government, the Department of Energy, which did give big loans to Tesla, which did you. you go to a three-wheeled vehicle, you weren't eligible for one of these loans that were designed to help electric car companies get off the ground.

And I guess the team that you sort of hired to run the company decided that maybe they should move towards a four-wheeled vehicle, like a traditional sedan. And that's where they kind of shifted all their energy towards. Yes, that's exactly right. And so, you know, they had used a lot of the same concepts and ideas 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 2009, you and Chris were on the way out. You had started this company in 2005, but about four years later, there's a professional team, many of whom 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 the company? Yeah, I mean, that's basically it. You know, we wanted to make sure if we're there, you know, getting a salary, that we're adding value and moving, all moving in the same direction. And I think, you know, the direction that the team and the board wanted to move was the four-wheel and the DOE loan. And so we felt that we would probably add more value to something new and something different. The professional team was in place and sort of left in charge. All right. So you guys leave.

Meantam, Aptera does manage 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. But for a variety of reasons that fell through. and by 2011, the company you founded, up tariff, it shut down. It basically liquidated and refunded the depositors money who wanted 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 this sort of dream that you guys had, that was it. I mean, were you, how did you feel at that time? You know, at the time I tried to channel all of that grief like in the positive energy. And, you know, so the day I left Aptera originally, you know, I was maybe two or three weeks before I had, you know, my first signed term sheet for my new company. And I just tried to put all of that thought and grief into energy, into momentum, you know, into something different. But it's, you know, it's analogous to the loss of someone that you love and you never really get over it. You, in 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 more industrial food production, but indoors.

But it was the idea of growing food as densely packed in three dimensions as you could and then 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, raise the highest amount of biomass per square, per unit area, per unit time. Wow. Meantime, Aptera's just done. the assets were auctioned off. Apparently, there was a Chinese company that, you know, at some point tried to spin out another, like, independent company called Aptera U.S. that sort of would make a gas version of the car, it never really took off. But it seems like this Chinese company that essentially bought the assets never really filed to take over Aptera's IP. Yeah, they didn't really do much of anything with it. And I think even the company that one of the people that bought the assets of the first auction,

they ended up with a bunch of the older vehicles 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 on display or something. But yeah, they were sort of cast to the four corners of the earth and the IP. the products and tools and nothing ever really happened with it. And it just kind of sat as an idea in my mind and Chris's mind 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, 2019, you and Chris joined forces to relaunch Aptera. Like, tell me about the conversations you were having to do that because, I mean, you started in 2005. It essentially, in 2011 and probably most of the investors lost money, right? So tell me how, I mean, how did you guys even start talking?

Like, take me the conversation. Like, let's start this again. Let's go back to this thing. Actually, 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 hired to, work in Washington, D.C. to focus on loans and subsidies that the government was offering to electric carmakers. Correct. Help us navigate the waters. When you're connected with someone like that, it's not just about sort of lobbying for loans and programs. It's also making sure you have

a seat at the table with different regulatory bodies or that you have the right legal oversight, protection and certain regulatory affairs. And so we were just sort of kicking around the idea saying, look, you know, who is it? There's just Tesla really, you know, there's no one else. And why is that? And everything is just an electrified car. It's not really designed. 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, the numbers and said, well, you know, with the new technology, we could. How many batteries could we fit in, you know, an apt tear anyway? And so we just started doing some back-of-the-napkin calculations. You know, with these new batteries, we could foot 100 kilowatt hours in that vehicle. And at 100-w-hours per mile, which is what we achieved with the old apt-air, about 95-watt-houres per mile, which is extremely efficient. You know, that would be 1,000 miles. And so that kind of just, it made our eyes open because we knew from some little bit of research that we had done that range was it wasn't the most, but it was a very important factor in 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 premise, is 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 going to 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 Raz, 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 Fambrough, the founder of Aptara Motors.

So basically, you decide, let's still make it an electric vehicle, but it'll have solar panels all over it as an additional source of power. Correct. Correct. You plug it in like normal if you want, But most people won't ever have to because here in Southern California, you'll probably get about 11,000 miles a year of free charge. Just by sitting it, just by leaving it outside. It's just going to get powered by the sun. That's right. And that'll give it about up to 40 miles of range just from solar energy.

That's right. And that's because this is a small and efficient vehicle. Like, because I mean, I imagine that the technology around solar just isn't quite there yet to power, you know, a one-ton vehicle. You're right. It's, you know, you're looking at 25% or so conversion efficiency, you know, once it's all sort of encapsulated in a matrix. And if you try to do this, you know, to any large electric vehicle, it's barely going to budge, you know, know, the needle. So 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 going to, it's going to mean less cells and less cost 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 to 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? So let's talk about the car. I mean, obviously now it's the landscape is very different from 2005 when you started. It's a different environment. You're seeing a lot of, you know, Model 3 Tesla's all over the United States now. You're seeing a lot of the

as a sort of a lower price point. You're seeing, you know, obviously Chevy and then the Ford F-150, lightning is out there. You've got the Rivians. You've got a lot of, you know, a lot of companies, Hyundai are in the game now, in the electric car game. Who is this for? 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, so what part of the market are you targeting? Well, Aptera is a brand and the Aptera's a product are going to appeal to people who want a kind of freedom, a freedom of mobility, a freedom to go and to move without being encumbered either by a charge cord or having to pay for electricity. You know, that freedom from the old way of doing things is really what Aptera is about.

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. Those are all great products for different customers, 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. And the first vehicle that you see, of course, a two-seater, that's the tip of the sword. But there's a product portfolio and vehicles that are coming. coming behind that that are going to embody the same ethos 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 going to have the same promise of the kind of solar freedom and solar mobility. So I think the majority of daily commutes are under like 40 miles. So in theory, right, if you're just driving a couple miles of 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 solar energy? Yes, it'll still charge.

It might only charge, you know, 10 miles worth or 12 miles worth or something like that if it's overcast or in a northern latitude, you know. And so the way to think about it is, you know, are you plugging it in once every six months? Are you plugging it in once every month? You know, that's how it's going to impact people. It's whether you get 30 miles a day, 40 miles a day, the launch vehicle is going to get around 400 miles range. It's really just going to affect, are you plugging it in monthly or maybe every two weeks

or something like that? So that's how that difference in daily solar charge is going to manifest. You also are, I mean, the body of the car is, is different. It's a carbon fiber body. And so, I mean, it kind of looks like, you know, there are these like velo racing bicycles, right? It's almost like this aerodynamic, like, I mean, Teardrop isn't the right description, as you said earlier, but it's sort of like that. Is that also, I mean, does that also enable it to, does that enable the range? I mean, the weight of the material, for example?

Well, it is a combination of both. The drag, the low drag, which, you know, the shape, the very curvacious, you know, shark-like shape, and the lightweight is both of those are what really enabled 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, very labor intensive. And it doesn't really scale. And so what we wanted was a process that we could stand. them out like you would stamp out steel pieces and produce them as fast as you would a steel car.

And that's what took us to Italy to CPC. Our partners have devised a very high throughput process, which to my knowledge, no one else in the world has this capacity and this ability to produce parts every four to six minutes, just like you were producing a steel part. So it's a strong composite thermoplastic, but without without any, of the hand labor and the waste and the cutting and the materials and all that other stuff. It just produces a nice part that comes right of the mold, ready to be vinyl wrapped or just used without having to paint. It's a radically different way of producing the vehicle. There's only six structural pieces.

And so being able to build a vehicle from six pieces, it's just an order of magnitude, simplification of tooling fixtures, et cetera. So the idea is to get these, I know that you can now order, you can reserve one, right? I mean, you have, I guess, up to about 40,000 people have reserved one. And the idea is to start delivering them when? It's about 43,000 Ivers reservations, about $1.6 billion worth of vehicles. We believe we're pretty confident after about nine months of closing our series. B funding somewhere between nine and 12 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 braking system certification. You know, for those that may not know, you can't just order that part and install it on the vehicle. It has to go through the manufacturer's own sort of certification process. So there's some things like that that we still have to do. And that's why we're fundraising the series B.

And what about the sort of the safety of the vehicle? I mean, it is, it's an enclosed vehicle, but it is three wheels and it's a two-seater. And so, I mean, obviously a motorcycle is not the safest mode of transportation, but this has airbags, presumably. I mean, it has all the safety features of a car. Yeah, you can think of it just as a modern car in terms of safety features. You know, the rollover crash. strength, airbags, seatbelts, interlocks, all that kind of stuff. Same stuff we have. Designed to the same standards. So not required for a motorcycle, but we're just trying to adhere to as many of the regular automotive standards that we can as we can. And the price point starts at about $26,000, I think.

Yeah, high 20s for the 250-mile version, which is the smallest battery pack, 25,000. kilowatt hour and it goes up to, you know, around 50,000, I think, for the highest configuration, a thousand mile range, three-wheel drive. So the options are basically battery pack size and you want two-wheel drive or three-wheel drive. Those are the big cost drivers. I mean, what do you like in terms of solar technology, right? There are some companies, including Fisker, which is coming back, right? It was sort of went away for a while. while, and it's coming back. They're also experimenting or will be experimenting with solar hybrid. I guess you call it a solar hybrid, like solar electric hybrid maybe. What kinds of

leaps in solar technology have to happen for a car to be fully solar powered? If the solar is going to be meaningful on the vehicle, if it's going to add a meaningful range, the vehicle is going to have to be aerodynamic, right? It can't just be a box. C-flat-sided vehicle. So if it's going to be aerodynamic, it means you're going to have curves in 3D. So fundamentally, you're going to be making 3D 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 and consistently, and then also make that panel very lightweight for an automotive application, and then also make it affordable, and then also make it able to stand up to hail and rocks? that's what's required to make it practical. And that's what we've been doing for the past two years. So, I mean, looking ahead, five years from now, and there's lots of Aptera's driving down the freeway up and down the freeways, at least in California and maybe beyond, from what you know and from your perspective. I mean, are we looking at a future sooner than we may think of electric vehicles going a thousand plus miles on one charge? I definitely think so.

I think Epterra is going to show the way because the way technology is right now, there's no other way it's achievable without this extreme obsession with efficiency. There's no other platform out there that can do it. So the vehicles, the race for the high range, which I think is going to be the new era that you see unfolding 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 hopefully Aptera can maintain its lead in that position. I have to assume you're going to be one of the first owners of the Aptera.

When will you be driving one around? Permanently, I would say early next year. Yeah, I don't want a hand-built. I mean, I drive the prototypes here all the time, but I want to drive a production version. Yeah. So I'll have to fight probably Chris and a couple of other. investors for the very first one. But we'll see. Maybe we'll, you know, spin the bottle or something, see who gets the first one. But I think early next year I'll be driving one of the first ones.

Sounds like there's going to be a little bit of a fight. Yeah, I've learned not to, you know, try and arm wrestle him or fight him. I usually end up, you know, the doctor's office if I do that. By the way, I noticed that it has rearview mirrors, which presumably affects drag. I think that's a regulatory thing in the U.S. right? Because you can replace. rear view mirrors with cameras, but right, but the U.S., but the regulatory agency still require a rear view mirror. It's vestigial. It's like saying, you know, you must have a clip for 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. But it is a vestigial requirement. So we have the least amount of size required by law. Got it. And the doors open electronically or what? Because they open like wings. Yeah, there's electric and mechanical release. So there's a, 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 backup mechanical release underneath it, which many EVs have that strategy now. And, and, 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 like as a comparison, you know, any. modern EV that's out there. You fold down the back seats and you get a thousand liters of space or more in the Aptera. So it's a, I mean, you can put surfboards in it. You can put a ladder in there, tools. You can put, you know, if you're like a Macedonian army reenactment person, you can put all your spears and stuff in there as well. I mean, it's an amazing amount of space.

Wow. That's a huge market. Apparently a lot of Macedonian reenactment. actors out there. So that's a huge market. Yeah, we're going to be big in that market. That's Steve Ambrough, co-founder and co-CEO of Aptera 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 H-I-B-T and ID.

dot Wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablewe. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Carla Estevez, Liz Metzker, and Sam Paulson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.