APTERA SAYS ITS $40,000 SOLAR-POWERED EV IS FINALLY COMING THIS YEAR. SHOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?
Sixteen years after its first vehicles were supposed to roll off the line, Aptera has a reengineered car and big ambitions. There’s just one thing standing in the way.
Nearly two decades in the making, the otherworldly three-wheel Aptera is headed to production this year as a $40,000, 400-mile EV that can capture up to 40 miles worth of free solar energy every day. Maybe. The California startup made similar promises in 2008, 2009, 2012, and 2022 and yet it has never delivered a single vehicle. Is anything different this time?
In a no-frills booth at CES 2025, Aptera showed off its production-intent design with a new interior and details on the first cars that will hit the road. What started as a 300-mpg hybrid and 120-mile EV in 2007 has evolved into a 400-mile EV while staying true to the original three-wheel, two-passenger teardrop shape that gives the car incredible aerodynamics. Aptera claims an efficiency of 10 miles/kWh, double that of the most efficient car on sale in America today, the Lucid Air EV.
The roughly $40,000 Launch Edition will drive the front wheels with a 201-hp permanent-magnet motor supplied by Vitesco and powered by a 42-kWh lithium-ion battery built with LG cells. Aptera eventually plans to offer all-wheel-drive and versions with both larger and smaller batteries as well. Solar panels on the hood, dashboard, roof, and rear hatch can harness as much as 500 watts of electricity in the real world or up to 4 kWh over the course of a California summer day. It can also be charged at a peak of 50 kW through its NACS port.
It Always Comes Down to Money
Aptera says that it has more than 50,000 reservations and that it has has crowd-funded $140 million from 20,000 individual investors, but it needs more money if it’s going to deliver on its production promise this time. At CES, co-CEO (and one of Aptera’s original founders) Chris Anthony told MotorTrend it will take another $60 million to finish the development work, buy the tooling, and build out the Carlsbad, California, assembly plant. “We’re still in fundraising mode and we hope that we inspire some people in this beautiful building (Las Vegas Convention Center) to invest in Aptera,” Anthony said. “We’re trying to raise $20 million in the first quarter of this year. That will basically kick off all the long-lead items to get into production, but it’s a $60 million plan to get into volume production.”
Anthony said the company has already made one of its largest purchases, the molds for the carbon-fiber sheet-molding composite body structure and the fiberglass sheet-molding composite body panels that will be made in Italy. The next $20 million will cover the tooling for the diecast metal suspension arms and the injection-molded interior components.
There’s also plenty of engineering work that remains. The company has built four validation models with the production body that will be used to finalize the suspension calibration and tune the anti-lock brakes, among other tasks. Officially classified as a motorcycle, Aptera’s tripod skirts many of the regulations that would otherwise keep a company with just 50 employees from putting a car on American roads. The design does include two frontal airbags and Anthony says Aptera will eventually publish the videos and data from its own crash testing to demonstrate the vehicle’s crashworthiness.
Three-Wheeling in Vegas
A brief ride around Las Vegas in one of Aptera’s validation models served as a testament to how the company is simultaneously so close and so far from production. Limbo under the gullwing doors and you’ll find a surprisingly spacious cockpit including 32.5 cubic feet of cargo space behind the driver and passenger. For as alien as it looks from the outside, sitting in the Aptera feels surprising normal when you’re looking forward. The split side windows and lack of glass aft of the doors, however, mean the driver relies on cameras and screens to see what’s beside or behind them.
The engineering car had seats and seatbelts and little else in the way of passenger comforts. Our driver flipped a toggle switch to demonstrate the climate control blower’s hushed whir at full blast, but there were no vents to direct that air toward passengers. Back at the convention hall, a static show car modeled the production-intent interior that’s simpler (and presumably cheaper to build) than what was shown in 2022. Taking cues from Tesla, it features a yoke steering wheel and a central infotainment touchscreen that serves double duty as the instrument cluster. The prototype’s sideview camera mirror displays have been combined into a single screen on the steering column for production.
Weighing just 2,200 pounds, the Aptera accelerated briskly even though performance is limited by the unfinished software. We’re told to expect Launch Edition cars to hit 60 mph in less than six seconds. The chassis-development car we rode in didn’t have electricity flowing to its power steering rack, requiring the driver to muscle the yoke as he rolled out of the parking lot. On city streets, the Aptera cleared bumps and potholes comfortably, but impacts made their way into the unfinished cabin as noisy thumps and thunks.
The Long Road to Production
It would be relatively easy for Aptera to hand build cars in a garage and announce the start of production, but the plan calls for building up to 80 cars per day per the guidance of engineering consultant and YouTuber Sandy Munro, who is an Aptera investor and adviser. “He really helped shepherd the design from what was an early prototype prove-out design into how to make the most manufacturable vehicle ever,” Anthony said. The structure is built from just six parts and the entire car has been designed to be put together in a factory with just 12 stations.
But that radical simplicity complicates the job at hand right now. In addition to developing the car, the small engineering team also has to create the machine that makes it. Anthony’s plan has the factory ramping up to build 20,000 vehicles a year within nine months of starting production at the end of 2025.
Before that can happen, Aptera needs to clear the same hurdle that tripped it up in 2011 and sent the company stumbling into liquidation—the money. “We would love one investor to be so inspired by what we’re doing that they just hand us a $60 million check,” Anthony told MotorTrend. “But it could be something that’s kind of piecemeal over the next nine months to get that $60 million into the company.” Are you convinced?
2025-10-16T00:45:46Z