Electric cars are everywhere these days. You can’t walk 10 feet in NYC without running into the omnipresent T, teasing you as you walk down Broadway, and over on the sunny West Coast it’s even worse. But what a lot of the current models share is a lack of imagination. All the current models are just slight variations on cars as we have known them - 2 ton steel monstrosities barreling down the highway, festooned with technical equipment. A Tesla doesn’t look different from other cars, even if it is “cooler”. And of course, the issue with this is that electric motors are fundamentally not as “efficient” as gasoline. While they might be as good at transforming energy into motion, storing that energy takes a lot more weight, since batteries just do not have the energy density of gasoline.
It shows the power of the past. If you look around you, you’ll see that throughout society, everything you use is a mixture of the past and the future. We sit on chairs with designs a hundred years old, typing on laptops using compressed sand engraved with 7 nm diameter features to perform several billion logical operations a second, developed in the last 2 years. Houses are still built using the oldest of materials, food preparation hasn’t changed, and our alphabet and month names are derived from that of an empire dead 2000 years. Despite technological advancements, we’re still living in the past in the future.
And this has deadweight, “path dependence”, to quote Hacker from Yale. Thus despite using a radically new power system, our cars are still like the cars of yesteryear.
But this will change. Aptera Motors is the first sign of this change. They have taken the car and they have changed it in three ways:
Firstly, they made it as aerodynamic as possible. Secondly, they built it out of the lightest material possible, carbon fiber. Thirdly, they radically simplified the design of a car - the body is in three parts and the motors are in the wheel.
The net result of this is a car that’s much lighter than anything else on the market, and more efficient than anything else, and also due to the simplifications, potentially cheaper. It is a radical rethinking of what a car should be in a new age.
And it is a testament to the technology of today. Why should cars be built of heavy steel when carbon fiber exists? We have infinitely more advanced tools for aerodynamic design, yet cars are essentially still streamlined boxes on wheels, and electric motors could make things simpler as they are simpler yet a lot of manufacturers make it more complicated. It’s a return to the original purpose of a car, which is to move things about faster and more efficiently.
And with these efficiencies and simplifications, Aptera can get a 1000 miles on a single charge, and support 40 miles a day solar charging. In addition, they’re also claiming a $20k price tag.
Which is amazing, if they can take it to production, which I am more skeptical of, given a startup’s tendency to swallow capital. They haven’t started manufacturing yet, and will only do so early next year, so it still remains to be seen whether they will be successful.
But even besides this, I think that this car, Aptera still indicates the start of a future. With the rise of electric cars, people will have to start redesigning the car to match. There will be more cars like Aptera, different cars, with different designs as the market forces the car manufacturers to adapt to the new power paradigm. There will probably be some resistance, but the car as we know it will transform, and become something different something new. Just as no one can recognize the cars of 1948, so too no one will recognize the cars of 2084 as they zoom about with their electric motors, potentially navigating themselves through the robot-cleaned streets of the city. Cars will be more sustainable, yet cheaper and more efficient. There’s no reason to think that they won’t be.