Steve Fambro didn’t get into the car business to save the world. He did it to go faster on freeways.
Fambro was driving 36 miles a day, during rush hour, to and from his biotech job in La Jolla, Calif. As traffic slowed to a crawl, motorcycles whizzed past in the carpool lane. He wanted to do the same, and after trying a motorbike and becoming worried about his safety, he decided he wanted to do the same in an enclosed vehicle. He bought a hybrid, but as an engineer he still yearned for a vehicle that got even better fuel economy.
That left electric cars. The selection was discouraging: tiny, boxy vehicles with a short range that took a long time to charge. “Anything you could buy looked as if it was designed in the 1970s, ” says Fambro.
So he decided to start his own car company. In November 2008, Fambro will begin selling the Aptera. That means “wingless” in Greek, but don’t think this car won’t fly. It’s a sleek two-seat, three-wheel electric vehicle with a top speed of 95 miles an hour, and it comes in two versions: all electric and hybrid.
Made of a Space Age composite material, the hybrid gets 300 miles per gallon, while the electric goes 100 miles on a single three- to six-hour charge. And it looks great in the carpool lane.
For the first time since the early 20th century, America is seeing a flowering of entrepreneurship in the auto industry. Today at least 11 new electric car companies, each working on a wide range of technologies, have launched or plan to launch models. Several of the startups are clustered around Silicon Valley, drawing on the brainpower and pocketbooks of high-tech engineers and venture capitalists. These upstarts are not modest. They believe they can do what major automakers have failed to do: bring an electric car to the mass market.
Electric cars, to be sure, are not new. About a century ago Thomas Edison joined forces with Henry Ford to develop an electric car that would be as affordable as the Model T. In those early days of the automobile, hundreds of manufacturers all over the country tried to compete making both electric and gasoline-powered cars. But economies of scale were not on their side, and small shops - some 415 of them in 1914, each of which produced a few handmade cars a year - eventually gave way to the Big Three.
Five years ago, Aptera’s founder Steve Fambro endeavored to design and build a passenger vehicle that was safe, comfortable, and more fuel-efficient than anything ever produced. This aspiration, combined with his background in engineering, led him to an intensive study of aerodynamics, and composite aircraft construction. He hypothesized that a low-drag, aerodynamic body shape could be achieved without sacrificing comfort, drivability or safety.
What emerged, after much designing, conceptualizing, and constructing, was a prototype two-seat, three-wheeled vehicle. This first operating prototype achieved a stunning 230 miles per gallon, Building on this success, Steve expanded his Aptera team and created the Aptera Typ-1, which has been re-designed, re-engineered, and refined into a production ready vehicle. We are excited to announce that the Aptera Typ-1 is now available for reservations.
