Seeker Blog

and the Idealab backed company is hiring. In the latest Aptera newsletter they say they have the $$ to start production.

These past few months, we’ve been working hard to evolve the Typ-1 out of the research and design phase, into manufacturing. That’s meant late nights, intensive fine-tuning, and loads of caffeine, all to make sure that the vehicle is as safe, efficient and comfortable as possible.

What began, essentially, as a very ambitious and slightly insane concept vehicle will soon be staking its place in the real world. For the past two years, with the support of Idealab and EssenJay Investments, we’ve been imagining, sketching, engineering, and hammering away at the future of sustainable transportation. We focused on aerodynamics, efficiency, and flow at every step of the process.

Amazingly, it took only nine months for us to put together the first model. Designed to minimize drag and friction for the greatest fuel efficiency ever seen in a consumer vehicle, the pre-production Typ-1 was shaped like a teardrop and had three wheels, a small engine, and gull-wing doors. The criticisms were inevitable; ‘It won’t work’ and ‘It won’t be stable enough’ were just some of the concerns we heard. But then we recorded 231 miles per gallon on our first test drive. The critics got quiet and everyone started paying attention. Even NASA’s aerodynamics lab did a double-take because of our astounding initial results.

Then, in 2007, we hired automotive designer Jason Hill (of Eleven, LLC) to evolve the pre-production Typ-1 into a vehicle poised for mass-consumption and mass adoption. He’d worked previously on the Porsche Carrera GT and the Smart car, so we knew he’d be perfect to help us further refine the vehicle’s interior and exterior for unmatched style and functionality.

MANUFACTURING STARTS NOW

That’s right. We’re on the final stretch. We have raised enough money to manufacture and support the Typ-1. Here’s where we’re going next:

• we’re hiring a bunch of new people
• moving into our new larger facility
• conducting advanced crash testing
• refining the manufacturing process
• starting mass-production of your vehicles
• building the first Aptera store
• delivering the first Aptera

I keep wondering how much it costs (and how long) to clear all the safety regulatory hurdles. Here’s what they say about crash testing:

Aptera has been working quietly with CD-Adapco and ABAQUS for several months, conducting frontal offset crash test simulations. Using these incredibly powerful tools, we are continually refining and testing our vehicles in software, performing numerous ‘virtual crashes’ on computers. Our next step is to corroborate the data with live crash tests.

It is a much faster, and more efficient process, to use software analysis in addition to physical crash tests. We create a spectrum of virtual conditions, so that we may test the Typ-1 in every real-world environment. The Typ-1 is performing beautifully in the simulations, and we will soon upload the associated video and pictures to the website. We begin our side-impact phase sometime in the next two months, and we have a high degree of confidence that we’ll see similar results.

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