Aptera Motors: A Paradigm shift in EV technology

[Music] hey everybody i'm zach and i'm jesse and you're watching disruptive investing and next up we're going to be interviewing the ceos the co-ceos of aptera motors they are making this the paradigm it's a three-wheeled all-electric solar powered it's got solar panels on it vehicle which can go a thousand miles yeah so i mean that's the top light you don't have to get a battery that big but if you want to you could choose that battery so yeah this can be an interesting interview and i want to say before we get into the interview i had heard about terra a few years ago and then they disappeared and i was like well i don't understand they're back is there a different company it's the same ceos they're going to explain more about that but one interesting point here and i don't want to pat ourselves on the back too much but when you're looking at a company and you go to your website there and you see two guys they're like oh let's see oh you're like okay i guess you're great but you really need to hear from people and i think today you're going to hear maybe what's going to impress you or not about the company and maybe might make a difference in whether you're interested in moving forward on looking at the car or maybe even investing in the company i guess i want to start off with a question which is that i had heard of aptera i think a few years ago and then i was like where'd it go and then it came back and so i think a lot of our viewers might be thinking the same thing which is like the name is very familiar and you guys are very familiar because you're the original founders but then you disappeared so can you kind of walk us through the history of what happened yeah chris and i started aptera back in 2006. it started as a project in my garage something to keep me busy and to make an electric vehicle we raised about 40 million dollars of funding we built the prototypes that you saw we hired a professional management team from detroit and about a year after that chris and i left the company just because we had a difference of direction that we wanted to take so chris started flux power battery company he'll tell you about that and i got into vertical farming uh i created a company called fam grow that took me to the middle east for two years with my family i came back and uh chris approached me about restarting aptera and the rest is history unfortunately the company uh got really leveraged to a doe loan uh to the tune of 600 million or so dollars and uh that loan just didn't happen after 2009 the the loan got really restricted and the economy wasn't doing so well so you know unfortunately a lot of great people that came up with a lot of great innovation early on at uptera had to part ways and the company really just sat for a decade and then steve and i were lucky enough to be able to jump back into it about a year and a half ago and we've been working way too many hours ever since uh trying to get this beauty right here done uh so we can then have a path to production here in just a year i think the precipitating event was we had a chance to reacquire some of the intellectual property and once we did that we thought well with advancements of batteries and our efficient design we could we could pack a thousand miles worth of batteries in this thing and so that really got our attention i mean we both drove electric or drive electric vehicles and did so at the time but um really made us think that the market the timing everything was better now than it was ten years ago so so how did you fit a thousand miles into that little car behind you a thousand miles of batteries aren't easy uh it is very challenging for sure 100 kilowatt hours but uh the the first way to start to answer the problem is to have an efficient platform i'm just showing you i can roll it back and forth just while sitting down on the stool so it's just low rolling resistance low aerodynamic resistance we burn less than 100 watt hours per mile the epa highway driving cycle so that's really the first step second step is very creative packaging and that's that's all i'll say about that the 25 kilowatt 40 kilowatt 60 kilowatt that those that's pretty easy packaging with 100 kilowatt we have to do some creative things what jesse and i were talking about doing since we're getting one of these is i would like to just get in it and drive and not stop for hopefully a thousand miles like that would just blow my mind yeah it's uh it's amazing to think about uh you may need one of those astronaut diapers if you're going to charge that part but yeah yeah it's incredible range it's really cool to think that you could drive across the country and maybe only stop for three charge stops now what's also super interesting about your car and the other thing that caught us i think is the solar panels all over the car and we've heard elon say many times like oh you shouldn't bother putting the solar panels on the car you should put them on a house why did you guys decide to put them on the car it's the most efficient uh if you if you look at your energy consumption you know there's uh what 32 kilowatt hours in a gallon of gasoline something like that so you figure average car burns a couple of gallons of gas a day that energy equivalent well do you want to put it at home and then store it at home and then also move it to your vehicle or do you just want to store it in your vehicle and use it for your vehicle you can still have solar cells on your home but the idea that you have your store you need your storage device anyway on the vehicle so why not make the most use of it number one number two in a typical vehicle like a gosh like a tesla or a bolt even i mean your the diff the energy differential that you're going to capture from solar is so little compared to the energy needs of the vehicle so it almost it's inconsequential this vehicle however it can really move the needle yeah 700 watts of solar production uh really adds up so you know if you can produce more than four kilowatt hours a day that can take you more than 40 miles a day the average north american driver drives about 31 miles a day in europe they drive about 26 miles a day so for the average consumer you could buy an aptera that you never have to plug in unless you want to go on a long trip um so yeah it's a it's pretty exciting to have the technology on the vehicle there's also a conversion loss issue if you're producing solar power at home you're converting that storing that then you'd have to reconvert it to charge your vehicle um so you know zero conversion loss from the solar on the vehicle to our battery pack is is the direction that we think is also i mean keep in mind right if you're if you work somewhere you're going somewhere the solar on your roof doesn't really help you during the day to charge your vehicle you'd have to have again batteries at your house and then reconvert it or have it there during during the day so it's just kind of limiting and uh the the whole idea about a thousand miles in solar electric vehicle is that it's it's not limiting it's it's freedom it gives you the ability to just do your normal commute and you don't have to plug it in my wife and i fight for a single spot in the garage and so you know if if i have to charge and i ask her well can you park outside and let me park inside and this and that so it's just it's a nuisance i mean if you could just park it in the parking lot when you get to work and not have to worry about it except on long trips it's you know that's real freedom and so the most important thing here is that the uh the the chassis itself is so darn efficient i mean i saw you pushing it forward and backwards earlier and i mean when i start telling people about electric cars and i use my car as an example you know it's a tesla model 3 and it has you know probably 60 70 kilowatt hours of energy in there explaining how much energy is stored in a battery pack and how much energy i'm gonna use to move while it's significantly less energy than a gas engine wastes essentially um it's still quite a bit of energy it's more than most people can imagine how much like roughly how much less energy are you using by moving an aptera forward compared to say my model 3. we're four times as efficient as the average ev but i think you know a premise that people probably don't understand about vehicles and their energy consumption is that with a typical passenger car you use up to 60 of your fuel at highway speeds just pushing air out of the way so if you could take that aerodynamic drag down to zero you would instantly have sixty percent better fuel economy so just by the shape of the up terra we get sixty percent better fuel economy right off the bat we're a composite chassis we're lightweight we also have a super efficient power train so when you put all that together you know we use you know a a quarter of what the average ev out there uses that's amazing because i mean the model 3 is one of the most efficient vehicles on the road and you're saying that you're not just going to drop it down by 20 you're going to be dropping it down by 75 you're talking a quarter i mean are you going to have one of those things that they have on the flashlight so you could recharge in in the case of an emergency it seems like it's such a little amount of power to to put into this thing to get it moving that's it's just insane and of course it would make sense to put solar panels on it if it takes that little energy to move it the thinking of moving moving the needle moving the engineering needle in terms of orders of magnitude it came from my my old boss at illumina the biotech company i worked at and so he always challenged us to we thought about saving the cost or improving the time on a certain step with a robot to not think about five or ten percent but how do you how do you change something by an order of magnitude and so that was the thought exercise that we started with the drag coefficient so how do we make mathematically you know the cd times a go to zero well can't really go to zero but can we lower it almost an order of magnitude or maybe a factor of five and that thinking just it pays off in so many other areas of the vehicle because then you need less structure you need less weight that means you need less batteries which again are less weight etc etc but i think who's really going to appreciate the low drag are the the customers in germany because you know the losses are exponential as you go up in speed so we're doing the epa highway driving cycle here everybody's comparing that epa highway driving cycle which is average 49 miles an hour you imagine driving 80 90 miles an hour and the differences in range are going to be profound between this vehicle and any other ev so how fast can the aptera go it's electromechanically limited at 100 miles an hour uh 110 you can creep up to uh downhill you can go faster though so it's not it's not a limiting vehicle i think a lot of people have seen the aptera in videos or in pictures and first they think it's small it's it's not small it's as it's as long as a prius and as white as a model s uh then they think oh it must be limited in speed or something maybe it's like a 45 mile an hour vehicle no it's zero to 60 and pin your head back and it's 100 miles an hour on the freeway so you know i i hope that we can get across to people as they learn more and more about us that this is not a compromised vehicle just because you're able to get free power from the sun and you're able to get a thousand miles range you can still live a comfortable life in your vehicle and have something that's peppy and fun to drive and something that's not small i can confirm nor deny that there will be a video of this drag racing uh someone's model s on the barona speedway oh so i mean this idea of a compromised vehicle kind of goes hand in hand with an electric car i think because of some of the early electric cars that we saw they were not necessarily compromised vehicles but they were compliance vehicles right you had the leaf and you the leaf was pretty good but you had you know the the e-golf you've had you know the ford focus electric that no one has ever seen but all of these cars were limping along because they had such tiny ranges they weren't that fast those were people's first uh you know thoughts of an electric car and maybe the prius which again underpowered um efficient but efficiency didn't equal power um and so is that some is that a challenge that you kind of had to face early on like but we're talking uh you know almost a decade ago was was trying to convince people that an electric car that was efficient could also be powerful yeah you know in the early days um the industry was so different i mean people were asking us questions like what happens in the rain in an electric car you get electrocuted um you know they had no idea you know how to even plug them in uh the j1772 standard hadn't even been adopted by the sca or sae yet so we didn't even have a way to plug in the first vehicles we were using like a shore power from boats like the plugs for those for the early apteras um so you know i think that people have just gotten used to electric vehicles and we can do nothing but commend the early electric vehicle efforts because you know they treaded the ground that's made the industry what it is today so you know we think everyone a lot to get us here but now we have you know access to different charge port technologies we have a supply and vendor chain that can offer us things like dc to dc converters and you know high voltage interconnects and all these wonderful things that it takes to make an electric vehicle that 10 years ago we were inventing and we had a you know team of a lot of engineers to make that happen but it's expensive to invent stuff and if you invent something then you have to validate it so we would much rather just buy that validated part that that we can get off the shelf because you know what our expertise is is aerodynamics lightweight super efficient powertrain so that's what we want to stick to i think the the thing that's different also though is that tesla made electric vehicles seem normal and even desirable whereas even until a couple years ago the oems who still make gasoline vehicles that are also making compliance or compliancy feeling electric vehicles you can tell just by driving it by getting in it you know they their heart's not in it it's they're they're torn emotionally you know they make suvs they make electric vehicles they make hybrids what are they making they don't know what they're making the tesla has a very clear focus they're making electric vehicles and they do that very well and so companies like aptera or tesla or other people just in the electric vehicle space have a really clear idea of what it takes to make something desirable and efficient and to give you freedom and to surprise you and delight you whereas the other companies the traditional companies i think are sort of struggling existentially to understand who they are what they even want to make so earlier this year you had a successful private investment round and you had a successful crowdfunding round and i can see why it was i think 300 over what you're even even maybe expecting and i'm sure that's because people saw the car and were really excited by it but you're still a small company and i guess my question is um you've really impressed us because you've gone beyond just showing a cgi car you have a real car behind you but you're about to hit what elon calls you know kind of production hell i'm assuming which is trying to figure out how to scale up can you talk us through how you're going to get from this prototype car to a mass production car yeah you know steve and i have great experience scaling companies me with my boat company over many years and now flux power which just recently took public to the nasdaq um you know about six months ago so um you know we've taken uh great world-changing ideas and turned them into reality and you know now that we have so many has so many orders on the aptera you know we have a lot of people expecting us to deliver uh very quickly and to automotive standards that's a challenge because testing and validation uh just takes time but um you know our investors have been generous um you know beyond compare and we can we can only be so so thankful for them uh and we're opening up a new investment round uh here in february to also allow you know any any person out there really to invest in aptera and follow on our journey and we think that that's enough money to get us into production uh by the end of 2021. um it's got to happen quickly and we're going to keep pressing towards that but elon's right production is hell it takes a lot of effort a lot of manpower and it's a very different skill set than kind of the early prototyping and architecture phase you know it takes a totally different skill set so we've been lucky enough to engage companies like monroe and associates and they're helping us uh with you know validating all of our parts for production and then also helping us build assembly lines that can scale very easily so i think we've got a great team coalescing around us and uh you know very soon we can start executing on that path there's there's a globe not only a global supply chain but a global resource bank for us now that didn't exist 10 years ago and monroe is helping us navigate that so you know when we go to sleep here at night there's people in different parts of the world working on different components of this vehicle work never really stops that didn't exist when we first started the company and so that lets us stretch our dollar by you know almost a factor of tenants sometimes and so um the the systems that are available to us are different a lot of the things that we had to struggle to even ideate exist now uh and we have this sort of global resource reach that monroe is helping us with that we didn't have access to before so those are the the things that are really helping us put this into production can you tell us about um what has sandy brought to you guys so far i know that you guys started working with them i think a few months ago how has his approach from his team helped you guys on your next step to mass production yeah we actually started working with them uh earlier this year so i think i've been working with them like nine months or so but we brought them in very early because we knew that they could help us once we got to this phase of our development and we wanted to get them involved you know to see how we were architecting the vehicle see how we were bringing things together uh you know they basically have done you know kind of a complete design review of the whole vehicle and helped us on you know ip strategy and hvac strategy you know but now is when the work gets serious now is when we have to really put the pieces of the puzzle together and get the vendors lined up and you know and hopefully six months or so we're starting to station build things and they're going to be helping us you know how do you organize the parts to have a really efficient build and then you know honk the horn and drive the vehicle out to deliver to a customer so you know we've worked with them kind of just on a broad list of things so far and now we're starting to get more serious about the production intent thing to summarize really though or even simplify what chris said is sandy has is aligned with us his team with a crawl walk and run strategy and that involves everything from how how parts are quoted to the vendors are sourced from to the kind of validation they go through and low volume medium volume and then once we reach production volumes later so we we have a plan for that pathway and he's he's has been and will continue to be instrumental in helping us executing that are you going to be building it right there in san diego yes yeah an interesting thing about our build is um you know we're trying to make the vehicle very modular so you know you have like a a rear suspension and subframe model a front suspension and subframe model on a dash uh module uh you know battery pack module and you know with those 10 or 12 modules we'll be doing the light assembly of those here in san diego so you know it will be an interesting build process that's probably unlike you know really any other vehicle company or car company out there but you know we think we can execute it here in san diego and we think we can have a small factory that we can scale up to many many factories over time um and just start getting vehicles on the road and into people's hands in comparison like your model 3 tesla model 3 has over let's say 200 parts and what they call the body and white the main main structure of the vehicle uh this has less than 10. and so further uh these pieces mostly align themselves so there's there's mechanisms and features in the parts that let them line up uh on their own accord without external tooling or jigs and so that really facilitates a much faster construction than than the robotics and clamps and fixtures that are needed needed on a traditional steel body but they have to be precisely held in place and then welded and moved on to the next step we don't have that here we have about 10 pieces that mostly self-align when they go together so the entire build process uh lets itself be scalable as chris mentioned like in any location so the the pieces of the vehicle can nest as they're shipped to different locations to be assembled as opposed to shipping entire bodies so that gives us flexibility to assemble in different locations a symbol to where the customers are as opposed to assembling here and shipping them 2 000 miles away yeah our factory will look very different because everything's human positionable so at a typical factory you see tons of robots you know we will have robotics and automation but it'll be nothing like a traditional automotive plant is that how you've been able to get the car to be so inexpensive because i think another thing that surprised me was i thought you know thousand miles of range solar panels okay so this is gonna be a hundred thousand dollars plus and then when i went to look into possibly putting in a pre-order i was pleasantly surprised to see the price um and then i even saw that like i could add on more solar panels for very cheap it was like you know 900 bucks yeah sure uh is that how you were able to do it that is a great question and it harkens back to how much more efficient we are than the typical ev because we use a quarter of the power per mile of a typical ev we also use a quarter of the battery pack uh and the battery is the most expensive part of any bill of materials of any ev out there so if you can reduce the cost of that battery pack you're reducing the cost of the overall vehicle so you know we feel very good about being able to offer you know a 25 000 ish vehicle to the masses that still gets 250 miles range i think it's really cool and it's only enabled because the vehicle platform itself is so efficient and uses so little batteries and one one distinction too chris i don't believe we've um accounted for any government rebate at all in this this pricing is that correct yeah so that's not like typical pricing that's quoted minus a 7 500 rebate or your state rebate or whatever this is the msrp what the efficiency really lets us get is something unlike any other players potentially and that is profitability without the government incentives and i think that's uh that's enabled clearly by the need for fewer batteries through the design and that's just flabbergasting because i mean there was you know the bmw i3 it was supposed to be this extraordinarily efficient vehicle it had a little tiny with tires they were they felt they felt like bicycle tires in the snow it was made out of all carbon fiber and yet the range was 60 ish miles and they had to put a range extender on it i mean i know that the shape of it is essentially a big box but the shape of what you've come up with has allowed you to do so much more than what uh a big traditional car company with lots and lots of resources was able to come up with um with some of the you know the brightest minds in the industry they weren't able to come up with a car that was as efficient as yours do you think that it's because of uh their corporate culture that they needed to have the bmw you know uh look on the front of the car and and something like an aptera would just never fly i mean it has to be you you don't make it high up in senior management and those companies for taking big risks um the automotive industry is as we've experienced it i mean we've dealt with these manufacturers with tier ones they're the antithesis of risk and so you can't imagine someone who's climbed up their career through that ladder to be comfortable with something that looks so different um you know they would do clinics and studies and they would rationalize why it wouldn't work and this and that i think the i3 actually was pretty bold for a company like bmw but the problem is if you look at what drives sales of electric vehicles if you plot all the sales per month and per year of every electric vehicle sold in the u.s versus all the metrics you can think of the most correlating metric is range and and i3 didn't deliver and so they they move very few units and so they might look at it as a failure so we're going to blow range out of the water but i think i think the traditional companies are just what you said they they have a an ethos a way of thinking that uh it's just aligned with different factors it's not aligned with efficiency i think if you build combustion-powered vehicles and you're trying to think of a way to get into electric vehicles the natural step is to evolve your current platforms into electric and that's what we've seen suvs and trucks are very popular in the us and the the ev truck wars are happening because people have figured out oh i can sell an electric truck and people really want trucks in north america so that seems like a good path but if you really wanted to architect an electric vehicle to make the most of the materials you have available and to use the least amount of energy it's not going to look like a pickup truck or an suv or a regular combustion powered automobile it's just a completely different architecture you have to you have to throw away everything you thought before and come up with a whole new direction and i don't think that that's really possible with the inertia of some of these big companies and you know going further in that sort of direction i mean i think that it would be very unlikely for any of those auto companies to come up with a uh a car that you've come up with the shape of it is so i think for them out there however people and consumers they aren't you know going to those meetings every day and and they don't live in you know bmw worlds they don't live in gm world every day and so uh someone who's you know probably younger than me is growing up now and they're going to be thinking differently than people of the past so applying past concepts to future products it doesn't really work especially when there's such a big paradigm shift happening with electric vehicles so you know where a company like bmw might be like well if we made a vehicle that looked like this it's so different that the market might not like it and it's a risk for them it's actually that's the advantage that you have because where they won't even go there right you can go there and you could say we're going to have all of these advantages i mean i'm just thinking i want to be able to power this thing with a stationary bicycle i think i could like i think i could get a couple miles into it and a workout and i think that there might be a market for this kind of vehicle in the future but it's this chicken and egg problem and we see this a lot with electric cars tesla was either the chicken or the egg for you know just your run-of-the-mill normal looking electric cars no one wanted uh a tesla before tesla came out with what they made um or there were enough people but the aptera this concept of a super efficient looking vehicle and super efficient vehicle didn't really exist and no one was thinking like oh that's what i want i think the reason that they have this inertia in the automotive companies today is because of years of cheap gasoline you know i'm an electrical engineer by training and i've often counseled younger engineers you know the the hardest thing and the best thing to do also paradoxically is to find a way to remove a component remove a line of code uh remove a sensor don't bloat the system but make it smaller do more with less i mean consider how few clock cycles they had on the apollo lander as it you know did the calculations to match the radar trajectory and land on the moon and compare that to your apple watch people engineers especially become accustomed to to gloat and comfort and an excess of resources and so when you have this new constraint in this case electricity specifically from batteries because batteries are such as a scarce resource because they're so pricey it forces you to think different but if you come from the mentality where gasoline is cheap you know your thought is well more fuel in the tank bigger batteries and less stuff more batteries in there and i think it it has to that the thinking has to change to a more resource-constrained thinking uh because then you you find new and novel ways to deliver the same freedom the same fun and practicality but with less resources less energy i like how you brought up a couple things first of all paradigm this is a paradigm shift and that's the name of the car the other thing is this is a disruption and we're talking to a lot of investors right now who are disruptive investors they're looking for something that is disruptive that is what i think your company is by definition and i was excited to perk up my ears perked up when you mentioned there's another crowdfunding round opening up soon so for a lot of our investors watching they're used to investing on the stock market um and lately there's been a lot of spacks companies that merge um and basically don't have any real revenue yet but are kind of pre-revenue and they go into the stock market which is new for most companies um which makes i think a lot of people they're getting more used to getting into a pre-revenue company um can you talk to us about why if i'm an investor who's not that comfortable with crowdfunding um why maybe i should consider investing in aptera you know the the crowdfunding thing is an interesting mechanism altogether uh you know ten years ago when we had upterra there was no way to allow people to really have skin in the aptera game if you wanted to get in on an early investment in facebook or google or tesla just there was just no options 10 years ago but as of just a couple years ago this crowdfunding thing has caught on and really it's a way that people can invest in ideas that they love and support companies that they love and really go on this adventure from the start and you know for those companies that hit big um you know that investment pays off very very well over time and you know we personally don't think that these types of investments should be locked up to the very wealthy or the venture capitalist or the institutional banks of the world we think that people should have an opportunity to support great ideas that they love um and you know go along for the ride with that uh that company um you know it's uh i've taken several companies public so i know you know kind of the public game and i i see a lot of these uh these specs out there and it's a very interesting uh way for companies to go public but you know just like uh just like so many of the companies that have gotten back investments um over the last couple years if people would have been able to invest early with those companies and then they got us back investment to take the company public not only would those early investors have liquidity but they would also have some amazing returns right so um you know i i urge people to find companies that they love and if there's resources for them to invest early you know do it smart do your research uh and you know support things that you really like so getting back to your vehicle you are giving us two uh different things that are huge you mentioned earlier on that the you know the best-selling evs are the ones with bigger ranges and you're offering a vehicle with a thousand mile range and uh one of the things we haven't talked about today is that the cheaper you can get a vehicle the more people can afford it so i i believe the stat is for every five thousand dollars that you can knock off the price of a vehicle uh you double the amount of people that can buy that vehicle so you're doing both of those things you are reducing the price of the vehicle and you're increasing the range to you're beating tesla in range uh so that's a huge pat on the back but you're also beating them in price so those two things for people who are like well i don't want this car i need i need a pickup truck all the time and they're i'm a youtuber so i can just feel the comments coming in you know all the time and you see something looks funny and you go i don't think that doctor i wouldn't want that and therefore no one would want it but i would argue if if this is an electric vehicle that you can afford and you're going to be making tremendous gas savings i mean i did the math for me and i think i'm you know i'm paying one-sixth uh electricity uh then i would be paying for gas for a similar vehicle if we're doing a quarter then uh hang on here uh we're doing what 1 24th you know how much i would actually be paying for for fuel that's humongous on top of the fact that it's a car that a lot of people can afford uh hang on as soon as people realize this math i think that a vehicle like the paradigm is going to be a no-brainer yeah it's um you know the uptera won't be for everyone and if everyone loved it we would probably have a problem you know it's a polarizing design and it's a design dictated by science not a design dictated by a group that did market surveys and went out and drew pictures for people of you know the next camry um it is you know really a vehicle born of the science of efficiency and uh some people because i've heard it uh have a very visceral dislike for the shape and it's three wheels they can't wrap their head around it's just not going to happen but we think that a lot of people will see it for what it is a a great solution for some of our energy usage problems and we you know having done this over a decade ago we thought that the whole industry would be like this now we thought that all the vehicles would look like this uh in 10 years i mean that was our dream and uh you know 10 years have passed since our last effort and we have big suvs for electric vehicles now we have you know evs coming to the market today that are going to use an average of six to 700 watt hours per mile so they're going to have to have 200 kilowatt hour battery packs we could go 2 000 miles on that same energy so you know we think that as an industry things are being pushed in the wrong direction and we would love to see them pushed in a more efficient direction more aerodynamic lighter weight efficient power trains so that's what we're bringing to market and we hope that people love it and some people won't and that's fine one of the benefits that aptera has now is the ability to study 10 years of electric vehicle sales which is what we've done we've developed a formula again with matlab's help to understand what factors in our opinion are driving the sales and so we have a factor we call it the utility factor and it's it's a number of things and they're all weighted differently uh but you know speed or acceleration the number of people you can put in the vehicle can you take it off-road or not this sort of thing and we have a sort of a secret formula if you will of what will drive consumer demand and i think that not only will are we maximizing that formula here but it will also manifest with the other products in the in the product pipeline understanding what drives custer demand and then manifesting that into the product that's and and you touched on on some of the big drivers uh right then cost and range and those are pretty self-evident you don't really need a big study for that but there's there's um there's more that i think that we've been able to dial in as well and so you touched on your product roadmap can you kind of walk us through because i mean the paradigm sitting behind you great commuter car obviously uh if i can travel a thousand miles in it uh and it's gonna cost me uh less than i would pay for a comparable tesla which i can't buy a 1 000 mile range car yet from tesla so what else do you offer or are thinking of offering in the future yeah you know the next iterations will be of this platform you know possibly adding a third seat uh maybe a little extra room uh but then we hope to move on to other uh larger more capable additions additions that have more solar capability so adding more roof space would be great and obviously more more cargo and people room you can imagine a bigger version of the uptera that's still aerodynamic lightweight and has an efficient powertrain but just has more space uh has more roof has more cargo you know and it's uh it adds some utility factor for those customers you know if we take our product pipeline forward into something that has more utility it also gets us into areas where people can use them more as adventure vehicles you know to get outdoors to go further you know you take your your apterra on a on a camping trip that's 300 miles away and you let it charge in the sun while you're there for four days you actually have more juice in the tank than when you got there type thing is one thing that we're after but also with the more cargo space you can imagine a very utility version for businesses you know we have amazon prime trucks rolling all around southern california now but those trucks don't really drive very far you know 40 to 60 miles a day if we could offer a utility version to companies like that that they didn't have to add any charging infrastructure for they just drove around and parked them in parking lots and they never had to actually fuel them you would completely eliminate the fuel costs for a company like amazon which would be very very cool so we think that you know the product pipeline gets us into other areas where the solar has even more benefit and the lightweight aerodynamics and super efficient powertrain could really make a difference to the bottom lines of companies and really have an impact on uh you know emissions and environmental impact for for so many people yeah companies this is a different platform that's extensible to all of those kinds of things while still retaining the important aptera dna that enables this extraordinary efficiency so you could own a fleet without having to charge it for example and i think obviously that most people interpret that as adding a fourth wheel uh which for those kinds of vehicles are expected um i'm really intrigued by the fact that you guys are co-ceos of the company and when i'm looking to invest in a company the leadership is one of the most important parts of the company what's really unique and intriguing about you guys is that you started working together earlier on previous companies went your own separate ways in terms of working on different engineering products came back to this company and you're still friends you're still co-ceos uh what's that like working as co-ceos together well steve's one of those brilliant guys i've ever met um so you know it's it's amazing just to be able to do anything with them but we've helped each other with every company we've done we didn't really ever part ways we just his his life took him over to the middle east and my life kept me here but uh we were you know always talking and brainstorming and trying to figure out new and innovative white ideas to you know make the world a better place and i think uh you know we've done that in our separate ways you know advanced hydroponics could you know save an immense amount of water around the world if done properly and lithium batteries you know industrial equipment takes out diesel and propane uh devices you know all around the world so you know i i think it's great to come back for ab terra but uh yeah steve and i have been working together for you know over a decade on so many different things i i think you a company like this where the technology the change in technology that's required is so radical the speed at which it has to be done is is is radical as well the fundraising has to incur the coordination with sales and marketing and formulating those plans it almost requires two people to be operating at the same level as opposed to one traditional ceo and chris and i we work really well together you know i'm naturally an engineer so i'm naturally a pessimist i want to find the way things break and chris is naturally an optimist and so we both cancel each other out and find the best way forward you know left my own devices i might overthink something uh and so so with us working together um i think i honestly it's a it's probably the exact leadership that the company needs right now i think i couldn't imagine any one person that could navigate what we have to navigate in the short time frame that we have and so kind of in the same vein uh you know as the battery like you need a bigger battery if you have a more inefficient vehicle uh is charging speed uh charging speed you know you kind of just think well i need more power if i want to go more fast but it's like well not necessarily the more efficient the vehicle you can put in the same amount of power and get more range per unit of time of you know sitting at a charger and so by making a more efficient vehicle um with a similar battery size to many teslas for instance a good example you're going to be able to charge faster than those teslas even with the same amount of power coming in that's right i think you'd sit six minutes for every 24 minutes in a model three and if you're at a supercharger for example when you use such a little energy it completely changes the way you think about charging i mean to think that the same charger that you charge your iphone with could actually charge a vehicle like this to the tune of 150 to 200 miles a night i think that's uh it's an amazing proposition to just use your standard household outlets to come home at night and plug in your electric vehicles say you have a trip you know we're down here in san diego we go up to la a lot if you go to north la you know it's 150 miles a day if you go to a couple different places so so okay i want to recharge my uptera when i get home at night i just charge it into a plug it into a 110 outlet and i get 150 miles by the time i wake up the next morning i think that's really cool i i drive a bigger electric vehicle so to steve and i paid the 3 000 to install you know a 40 amp circuit to get 220 volt charging to my bigger um electric vehicle and one that's cost that i didn't want to spend set that money on fire and uh and i'm lucky if i get 200 miles of range charge overnight and that's with this you know very capable 220 40 amp service pulling down the whole grid wouldn't it be great to just plug your vehicle into an extension cord yeah wow i mean because that really changes the whole way that we have to think about charging infrastructure i mean it's so difficult for uh businesses to say okay we're going to install some chargers let's do eight you know and they're sitting at the board meaning they go let's do eight yeah that sounds like a good number you know we have a lot of you know it's maybe it's an engineering company and they have a lot of people driving teslas and i mean i was in that situation a couple years ago where they're like well you know six or seven or something like that and then you go to the the you know facilities manager and you say okay we're gonna need uh two 100 amp lines going out to the back of the building and they go excuse me like we don't have enough we don't have that much energy in the whole building how are we going to try like excu we're not a charging station we're a business how dare you demand that much energy and so that completely using your vehicle just though the 110 outlet that they're gonna plug in you know the electric weed whacker outside would get you more than enough range uh that's a game changer in the way that we need to be thinking about our cities and about just charging infrastructure in general yeah it's a whole it's a whole aspect that we haven't really talked about in terms of our our messaging or press in a large degree but the fact that you you obviate a lot of the charge infrastructure because you can go more than a typical tank's worth per charge if you will you can go 300 600 you know 1 000 depending upon the configuration that you have because you can charge so quickly at home you don't really need this infrastructure that's set up all over the the country sure it could help you if you're doing maybe a cross-country trip but uh i think around here at least you know people you know they drive uh more than two three four hours uh they typically take a flight or you know rent a bigger car because they're taking 12 people with them or something are there any slots open i know that we were probably one of the last to get in on the pre-order is there any slots open are you thinking of opening any more slots yeah the paradigm edition was the special edition which basically got you a lower cost vehicle for a signature edition early on but you can always customize your own aptera on our website aptera.us so just go to build your own custom aptera and you can get any range any style any color you know and we'll uh we'll have a production slot ready for you when when they come around i'm so excited to get in our paradigm yeah i can't wait to drive a thousand miles uh i will need the diapers i think i will if you guys personally haven't signed up for the referral program and are using it uh on your site and maybe you just want to do it personally not on your site but it 26 referrals get you free altera so we already have one i didn't know that oh all right yeah you uh you get a thousand dollars off your uptera purchase for every person you refer so if you get five people you get five thousand dollars off your purchase if you get 26 people you get a free up tara if you get 45 people you get a free premium thousand mile ab tariff you get 50 then you can get two up terrors we love referral programs on the show awesome all right well you you guys heard it i mean if you want to use our referral code that would be great we'll put the link in the description below and uh maybe we you could uh help us on our way to uh getting us uh our first aptera you know i think we should do what we did with the roadsters if you help us by getting a referral we'll uh stop and give you a ride in the aptera so think about that you guys could have one in every color one in every range yeah one in every color well thank you so much guys that was great talking to you today thanks guys appreciate it so much so that was a eye-opening interview i mean i knew uh i knew a bit about the car i knew the basic specs which normally with an ev tells you everything that you need to know but it's in a different class of ev than we've really talked about on this show before i want to be honest i don't think aptera really got the story out i mean i know it's hard they're focusing on making the car and all that but as you heard from them they really haven't talked about the efficiency that much and i'm glad you went deep on it because i didn't fully understand like what magic like are they pulling here how are they doing this so they're able to drive down the cost of the vehicle because there's less vehicle right you know just kind of hanging out which as we all know usually doesn't get used most of the time the back seats in my model 3 have only been set in maybe uh you know 50 times and i've driven that car of nearly you know 40 000 miles the the really interesting part to me was the the charging infrastructure the idea that i don't have to spend anywhere from a couple hundred to at least 500 in most cases up to a couple thousand dollars to install a charger at my house to have like decent charge rates that's just dropping the price straight off the vehicle if you really think about it well and we've talked about coefficient of drag so often on the show oh the tesla gets a 0.23 and so you take the coefficient of drag you bring it down as low as you can in their case i think it's 0.13 then you multiply it by the cross-sectional area of the car now in the apteris case if you look at it head-on it's almost not there and that's how the magic happens is because the wind doesn't see the air doesn't see it it just is cutting through and they're able to do it so much more efficiently whereas most electric cars you just have to hyper model you have to go very slowly so the air factor isn't a big deal and it's it gets back to a lot of uh first principle things i mean for all the talk that elon says about first principles this is a first principles electric car uh one that i think that if elon had brought out back in 2010 uh people might have been like i'm not going to drive in that it looks different but now that we're talking about electric vehicles i mean you might never have to charge this thing depending on where you live and they brought up a really good point which is not everyone has to love it i think a lot of times uh when we're thinking about something we're like if i don't like it then no one's gonna like it and if that doesn't there's eight billion of us on the planet because economically like i bought my leaf for nine thousand dollars right and i've definitely put some money into uh charging it not as much money as i would have put into any other car that i would have bought for nine thousand dollars but less i've spent some a little bit of money on maintenance but that's about it right there's not the oil changes the big maintenance things and the gas bill all of those things don't exist and now we're saying the the charging might be free or darn close and then talk about taking a play out of elon's playbook having a referral program with actually good referrals so like i can earn a thousand dollars off if you use my referral code well okay youtubers no brainer we're going to plug it but like regular people are going to plug it like oh wow if i tell my neighbors on the street about it and a few of you use it i get thousands of dollars off in aptera it's a smart move i know that you might be saying well now zach and jose are biased and well hey whoa well but here's the thing we're getting one so that we can bring you along like we do with all electric cars and i want to see can it go a thousand miles right but the referral program made a huge difference for tesla we know that because we went to an event where they had the biggest tesla referrers in the world and i want to admit we are biased we're biased for electric cars and i'll be honest again about solar i thought elon will everything out of his mouth is correct if you shouldn't put solar on a car but hearing why they're doing it makes a lot of sense it doesn't make sense to put uh solar panels on a model 3 you'd get maybe five miles a day at most in the best circumstances when you have a vehicle that's so efficient you can really put it you know the solar is going to make a huge difference to get tens and tens of miles each day from your car that makes i mean that's your whole commute exactly i'm i'm just my brain is on fire right now i'm thinking of all of the different ways that i can it's a different use case it's a different way of thinking of it it's almost like going from your regular bicycle to an e-bike and you're like oh i can ride it wherever i want the thought processes going through my mind it's like you can go on a road trip where it's like yeah there's not going to be any chargers whereas normally i can't i'm limited not very limited in my model 3 to the supercharger network and then i just want to go to the last point which is the crowd funding because you know i know that a few years ago to talk about investing a company that's not making any money was like well i'm going to wait till it makes money and that's a perfectly sound investment idea because then it's proven you are getting in a much more risky phase with the company heck they already went bankrupt once so it's risky but as they point out in the interview uh if you get in early then you have a much bigger equity stake in the company so bigger reward exactly so it's it's closer to what a venture capital firm would be able to do venture capital firms need to be fronting millions and millions of dollars uh the cool part about crowdfunding is that you don't need to front that much money um in order to be a part of it um what they were talking about with you know 10 years ago you would have to be an accredited investor which means that you'd kind of have to be worth at least a million dollars in uh was it liquid squid assets not counting your house that doesn't mean your house that doesn't mean you know liquid assets uh and we run into this problem all the time where there's different things we're like oh you can get in but only if you're an accredited investor and most people are like well i invest in the stock market so maybe i'm accredited then they come to find out oh i'm not crowdfunding rounds allow people to get in who are not accredited and at a lower amount so i mean whereas most venture capitalists have to put millions and millions into each round here you could probably i haven't seen the actual listing yet it hasn't happened but usually it's like 250 bucks at the minimum so it's like uh that's what you'd probably risk going to the casino one weekend right and again get back to this range being a big selling factor and the price being so low i know two factors that they beat tesla like if you said to me today i'd like you to come up the company beat them on range and price i'd be like you know because no other manufacturer can do that i mean you could argue maybe the id3 the bwi i really liked your question about why can't the other big manufacturers do this and they are stuck at not going to first principles they're stuck at like you said we have to have it look like a bmw it can't look like this right you'd have to re-imagine your entire brand and most car companies as they were talking about are so risk-averse try selling that look to your dealership network exactly like at the you know annual conference and be like here's the new bmw another point of this is cars like this first principles vehicles i've seen before you've seen them in solar races and stuff like that at the museum of science in boston there was this it was there for years and years and years it was the dusty uh solar-powered car with a little bubble for your head to stick out and it wasn't fast it wasn't sexy no one thought it was that attractive um and that was what everyone thought electric cars were because the battery technology was not there at the time you really had to rely on either solar going slowly having a super efficient car um and it wasn't going to be powerful this car going 100 miles an hour and being more efficient than anything else on the road that really changes things uh in my mind because you look at something like this and you're expecting slow you're expecting you know that they're just eking out the the barest ranges possible but that's not it at all you're getting a thousand miles of range something that no other ev on the planet can do i just want to thank you guys for watching and subscribing because it's because of you that we're able to reach out to companies like aptera and get right in there in the factory and get some answers to questions that you guys have asked so thanks so much for joining us thanks for being a subscriber don't forget to hit the like button that really helps the algorithm to share this because yeah we want people to learn about this car thank you so much for watching disruptive investing

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 227,309

Rating: 4.8906846 out of 5

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability, aptera, solar car, 1000 mile, range

Id: tZqx_n7MnsE

Length: 55min 8sec (3308 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/IranRPCV]

Long interview with the Aptera Motors' founders and lots of footage of the first "Noir" prototype driving around San Diego. Well worth your time if you are interested in Aptera

[u/ToddA1966]

Remember the good old days, when companies built products for consumers, rather than for investors? :)