How did a woman who the Securities and Exchange Commission says planned one of the largest accounting frauds in US history end up as Chief Financial Officer of Aptera Motors?

It’s just one of many questions swirling around what appears to be a meltdown in progress at the beleaguered manufacturer of safe, hyper-efficient electric vehicles (see the posts here, and here if you don’t know what’s going on).

When a business is running smoothly, there are strong incentives for everyone to be a team player and hide any signs of internal strife. However, as the rate of layoffs and “vacations” has increased over at Aptera, so has the potential for leaks. And sometimes a simple name can take you places you never thought you’d go.

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This post is an excerpt of an article from Popular Mechanics. You can read the full post on their website. Written by Ben Stewart.

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Many manufacturers of high-mpg and electric vehicles have adopted a 3-wheeled layout for cost and weight savings, and—in some cases—aerodynamic efficiency. In most states, however, these vehicles are classified as motorcycles. That motorcycle moniker has made them ineligible for DOE funds set aside to foster innovation among American automakers… until now!

More details, after the jump.

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There are quite a few three-wheelers these days: Aptera, Myers Motors and ZAP! Motors. And while those companies seem to be blocked from government funding, it isn’t stopping designers like 22-year-old Alex Hodge from New Zealand from churning out kickass mods like the Hawk.

The Hawk concept is part fighter jet, part sports car, and looks like it’s balls-out fun! The concept is built around the 999cc Honda RC51 V-twin engine has 10,000 rpm, 120 hp and a top speed of 144 mph.

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Normally a secretive company, Aptera chose this venue to be the first public debut of their new, pre-production “2e” electric car and gave attendees who signed up test rides (the list filled up quickly). At the same time, they released detailed feature sheets, discussed performance specs, toured the onboard software, and on and on down the list.

Where to start? After the jump!

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Unfortunately, the company tends not to be very talkative, so it’s those rare events where they go public that offer the most details. With their recent appearance on EVcast, they certainly didn’t disappoint. A transcript of the show follows.

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With the onslaught of electric concepts and announcements coming out of the 2009 Detroit Auto Show, you’d think that the entire world is about to junk their old jalopies and rush out and buy electric cars tomorrow.

But, alas, as much as millions of Americans would love to pay 3 cents a mile on their daily commutes, our choices for electric cars are, at the moment, severely lacking.

Although the promise of the 2009 Detroit Auto Show reeks of desperation, it’s not all smoke and mirrors. Believe it or not, there are a bunch of noteworthy electric cars, both all-battery and extended range plug-ins, reaching US production sometime in the next two years.

So, if you’ve got the time to wait and you find yourself longing for the cheapest, quietest, and most earth-friendly commute you could imagine, take a gander at this list… electric bliss is closer than you probably thought.

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The all-electric, three-wheeled 2e weighs in at around 1,500 pounds due to high-strength composite construction, has a small fraction as much aerodynamic drag as a Prius, goes 100-120 miles with a top speed of 85-90mph, and boasts normal car safety features, impressive crush test results, and crash testing (TBA).

With a price ranging from the mid $20s to the mid $40s (depending on options), Aptera is aiming to produce 10,000 a year in 2010 and 100,000 by 2015, including a subsequent four-wheel, four-seater code-named Palomar.

Now, they’ve announced what many have been long awaiting: a basic production schedule.

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Whichever path they choose, Democrats could be headed for a confrontation with Mr. Bush and were setting the stage for a dramatic lame-duck session

The confrontation in question is a proposal from Senate Democrats, with backing from President-elect Obama himself, to bail out the Big Three, under the premise that they are too big to fail and that if they went under, the ripple effects would be devastating. Curiously absent from the discussion, however, is the fate of a host of cleantech startups making extremely efficient vehicles powered by electricity, electricity plus gasoline or biofuels, and so forth.

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With the world focused on fuel economy, advanced car design seems to be converging around one point in space. And I do mean, literally, a point in space — a point sometimes seen flying over Roswell, or crashing in the Bermuda triangle.

Regardless of what you think about this type of design, it begs the question: do cars need to look like alien spacecraft to get decent fuel economy?

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The world’s first commercial air car is currently being produced by India’s largest automaker, Tata Motors, who is licensing the technology from European-based company MDI.  A compressed-air car uses the force of super-compressed air to move the engine’s pistons up and down, as opposed to explosions produced from injecting a small amount of fuel.  At higher speeds the engine will burn a small amount of fuel to create more compressed air, sort of like how a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt produces on-the-fly electricity. The hybrid air-car setup should be able use any number of fuels, including gasoline, propane, or ethanol.

So now that we’ve established how the Air Car will work, how green is it?

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Aptera also plans to use the new funds to construct a manufacturing facility in Vista, CA, close to the company’s present headquarters in Carlsbad.

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Take a look at the latest video from Aptera, a guided tour of their factory:

This story contains additional media. Click here to view the media.

You can also see pictures of the facility here.

Related Post: Aptera’s $26,000 Electric Car and 300 MPG Hybrid Coming Soon
Continued from page one

Bo: Hello, this is Bo Bennett from the EVCast.

Ryan: Hi, this is Ryan Levesque from EVCast.

Marques: Hey, guys, how are you doing?

Bo: Good, doing fine.

Ryan: Pretty good, Marques.

Bo: Good, doing fine! Great, excited to talk to you. Okay, this is the first time we ever did on our show, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard our show or are familiar with it, it’s the first time we actually went out to our listeners and asked them to submit a bunch of questions, and we have a lot of people who are big Aptera fans out there, and they have a lot of questions for you. We sifted through them, and we hope to ask you the best questions that we can. You ready?

Marques: (inaudible)

Bo: Great! The first.. I guess the… let’s start with the big news about Aptera recently was the delay in actually getting it to market or launching your first car. Can you tell me a little bit about that, why did you guys choose to push it back?

Marques: Sure. Um, we’d been marching along to a December 2008 launch time, but as we started digging into the vehicle at greater depth. From a number of standpoints, for one, we’ve been doing a lot of process trials, going through the way that we build the vehicle, how we make sure that every vehicle, that the first vehicle that comes off the line is going to be as good as the hundred-and-first and the one-thousand-and-first, and we found a lot of things in our manufacturing process that we felt like we needed some room for improvement — you know, the build is not exactly as repeatable as we needed it to be, so it was difficult for us to ensure that the first vehicle was going to get the same level of quality that the last, and in this marketplace, that’s not acceptable. We have to make sure that every consumer is going to be delighted with the vehicle from the moment that they pick it up whether they got the first one or the one-thousand-and-first one.

Bo: Sure.

Marques: The second piece was that we’ve been doing a lot of research. We’ve got about 60,000 people right now who follow us actively on the newsletter, and we went out to those folks and to those who have deposits, and asked them to give us some feedback on what they think the things are that we’re doing well, what do they think their expectations of the vehicle, and what we found is that the expectations on the part of our consumers are very very high. And so we added to that another set of research with additional people who we thought were potential buyers, and they gave us some more detailed feedback, and we’ve just been putting it all together, and what we found was that the level of expectation of what people want out of the Aptera, out of the 2e today has grown and evolved from where we had our original sights set in the beginning. In order for us to make sure that we’re delivering on the promise that we don’t have dissatisfied customers, we felt like it was time for us to slow down a little bit, go through a lot of vehicle refinements, and explore ways to improve the personal interaction with the vehicle and make it overall a better product.

Bo: Okay. That makes sense to me. How does this effect your schedule in terms of, say, getting the first vehicle out versus the fiftieth and the two-hundred-fiftieth — do you have a ramp-up schedule set at this point, or is it too early to know what that will be?

Marques: So, we do have a ramp-up schedule. What we’re doing now, though, is we’re trying to balance that ramp up schedule in terms of what we have in our mind against what the consumer’s real demand is.

Bo: Mmmhmm.

Marques: So, one of the things that we’ve asked is that some of our depositors are getting involved with us in a program that we call lock-in that helps us assess our first month of production more accurately. So, what we’re going to continue to do now is we’re going to build what we’ll call pre-production vehicles, and we’re going to hold them in a quarantine status, is probably the easiest way to explain it, where we’re going to keep it among the management team and our executives and doing evaluations for improving the vehicle between now and October, and when October comes, then we’re going to go by the public and actually start delivering vehicles. And gentlemen, I was just joined by our founder, Steve Fambro.

Bo: All right!

Ryan: Hello, Steve.

Steve: Hello.

Bo: Welcome. Thanks for joining us. So, this lock-in period — how many people do you have committed to this so far? Or, if you can’t give out the number, perhaps a percentage — just a rough idea. Because I know when it comes time to put down money, even just a deposit you can get back, maybe a lot of people are willing to do that, but when it’s firm, I’m really curious how many people would actually commit.

Marques: Well, I’d say right now we have over ten percent right now, and that’s with just about a week into the program, and the rate is going along quite steadily. I mean, people are, the people who saw the vision in Aptera early, are, they really believe in it, and they are trusting and confident with us, and they’re staying and taking it along.

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Ryan: Could you talk a little bit about some of the refinements that you’re working on? We’ve read about the narrowing the width of the vehicle so it can get through the drivethrough and the piece about the rolling down the window, but we’re wondering if there are other details that haven’t been widely reported that you might be able to share with us.

Marques: Well, I’ll let Steve take that question.

Steve: Great. Thanks, Marques. Well, a couple of things. Let’s set the record straight a little bit about the front-wheel drive. There could be an interpretation that that decision was made recently. In fact, we made that decision over a year ago, and have been testing front-wheel drive units in secret around Carlsbad. So we just recently decided, Marques decided, to let that information go public. It was such a boon to the performance of the vehicle. It accelerates better, it handles better, it has all sorts of positive attributes. And so a lot of the decisions that have been made that are coming to light were made a long time ago. But some of the decisions that Paul’s leadership has brought are really going to make the product just an unbelievable product; it takes it from the concept where it was and makes it fun, makes it usable, makes it meaningful to people’s lives.. Little things that have a lot of value. Little things like roll-down windows.

Bo: Mm.

Marques: I’ll add another one to the table. You know, we talked about the roll-down windows. If people, you know, say in a purest sense, ‘I don’t want that.’ But when you start to take into consideration the way you use your vehicle, things like making it through toll stations and making it through bank tellers and so on and so forth, that it starts to play, in terms of just making life easier, that’s one of the things that we really want the vehicle to be able to do. Something else that we’ve done is what we call the ingress/egress, or how easy it is to get in and out of the vehicle, we changed the door opening so that it’s easier for you to glide in and out of the vehicle, where as before, the way that the build was designed, it was designed to for one approach to safety maximization, we’ve been able to open the door a little bit more, and still maintain the safety, and actually take the safety up a notch but still making it easier for the person to interact with the vehicle.

Ryan: Gotcha. Now when you say ‘roll down the windows’, you’re not talking about one of those handles, are you, that you actually have to roll?

Marques: (chuckles) No.. that’s…

(Bo and Ryan laugh, cutting him off)

Ryan: I was going to say, for a modern tech vehicle, that’s pretty low tech there

(Marques laughs)

Steve: A lot of those things are counter-intuitive. You might think, well, that the electric window is a premium of weight or energy, but the electric mechanisms now are smaller and more compact and less weight than manual roll-down windows.

Bo: Mmhmm.

Ryan: Mm.

Steve: So there’s several reasons for going to electric windows, for example. The weight reason obviously appeals to Aptera even more, because we’re very weight-conscious.

Bo: Sure. Moving to the front-wheel drive, I assume that before with the rear-wheel you had the type of belt system in place, and with the front-wheel, do you have one wheel and motor in each, is that the way it works?

Steve: No. We actually have a single motor and a gearbox and transaxle, and it’s mounted pretty much center of the nosecone, and it drives both front wheels. And it has a differential.

Bo: Okay. Alright, let’s talk about the battery for a little bit. Have you announced who your battery supplier is?

Steve: No.

Marques: No, we have not.

Bo: Oh, okay. So I take it you’re not willing to announce that?

Ryan: You don’t want to give us an exclusive today?

(chuckling)

Marques: No, we’re not.

Steve: We probably don’t want to talk about the chemistry of the battery.

Bo: Okay, I was going to ask about chemistry too…

Marques: Generally what we like to tell people is it’s our own special combination of lithium iron phosphate and pixie dust.

(laughter)

Bo: I was going to say, and a tad bit of love. That’s good. That’s the way you’ve got to make the cars.

Marques: (inaudible)

Bo: All right. Okay, so that Xs off my next question, too. … And the next one.

Ryan: Oh, geez.

Bo: That’s an awful lot here, talking about batteries. Alright, that’s alright. How about the combustion engine? The external combustion engine. Did you guys consider using like a Stirling engine or the Cyclone, or do you have something else, can you talk about that technology?

Marques: I would say I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Bo: Oh, I’m sorry. For the… not the pure electric vehicle, but the hybrid.

Ryan: The range-extended.

Bo: The range-extended vehicle — did you guys pick out a specific range extender at this point, or is that still too early in the game?

Steve: Well, we’re working with several companies making internal combustion engines, not an external combustion like a Stirling.

Bo: Right. Uh.

Steve: Those engines are still not tenable for mobile applications there. They’re large, they’re heavy… they’re very efficient, but they’re not a good fit for our application. So we’re talking about, have been talking with several small engine manufacturers.

Bo: Okay. And how about the charge connector? Did you settle on a certain design yet? I know they just came out with a standard — are you guys offering a few different adapters, or have you considered what the car will be released with in terms of a connection?

Steve: I know the engineering team is on top of that new SAE standard. It is the connector made by Yazaki. But it’s very difficult to get ahold of. Nonetheless, they’ve got the requirements, the cad drawings, and to my knowledge they’re integrating it, but I don’t know when in the production process you’re going to see it.

Bo: Okay.

Steve: Initially it’s going to be a standard plug.

Bo: Alright. How about crash…

Marques: Just to clarify what he was saying, initially when we launch the EV, it comes with a standard plug arrangement that can adapt to a 110 outlet.

Bo: Okay.

Marques: So you can take an extension cord (inaudible).

Bo: Alright, great. And how about the crash testing? Do you guys have any results posted yet, or do you know when that’ll be ready?

Marques: No — the crash test development will be ongoing, and generally, not to be the big corporate auto guy, but that’s something that doesn’t usually get published until right at launch, because what we’ll do as we continue in our development, we’ll continue to refine and always improve. As we’ve said many times, safety is paramount in everything we do at Aptera, and we will -not- go live with anything until we’re absolutely positive we’ve squeezed out every ounce of possible performance we could get.

Bo: Okay. Well, I’m sure you guys are aware, they recently, the government recently passed that $7500 plug-in electric vehicle tax credit, but unfortunately it doesn’t apply to the three wheelers. You guys must be pretty bummed about that. Do you plan on doing anything to try to push it through?

Marques: That, uh… that actually sucked a lot…

(laughter)

Bo: Yeah

Marques: .. so, uh, we have had some conversations with some law makers and we’ll probably continue to do so. The good news about it is that many policymakers from all over the country… as a matter of fact, I had a conversation with a gentleman from New York State today call. They’re very interested in what we’re doing, and they see the benefit in Aptera’s approach over and among some of the other vehicles that are out there, so I don’t think that the battle is over for us yet.

Bo: Mmhmm. Well, that’s good…

Steve: We do have a very nice letter from the Department of Energy stating as such, reminding us that we don’t have four wheels; sorry, we can’t help you.

Ryan: Did you tell them, if you count the steering wheel, you have four wheels? (laughter) Hey, at least you guys are on their radar, right?

Marques: Yes we are. That’s a good approach; we’ll have to keep that in mind. One thing, at the end of the day, we hope that all areas of the government would consider a ultra-high efficiency vehicle that is delivering great performance and safety and truly better fuel economy or fuel economy equivalencies than pretty much anything else out there in the world, I hope they would consider that as they look at transportation for the future.

Bo: And when do you think customers or prospective customers would actually get to get into one of the 2es and drive it around, give it a test drive — do you have a timeframe for that?

Marques: I think you’ve already got some inside information. We’ve been holding off on saying this until… we publish a newsletter monthly, and our newsletter is due out next week, but we are actually going to be participating at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in the first week of February, and that will be the first time that we will be allowing potential consumers to get inside of the Aptera and go for a little bit of a joyride.

Bo: Nice. And where is that conference? Is that in California?

Marques: It’s in Long Beach, California.

Bo: Darn. So far away from here! … Not from the majority of your customers, I would imagine. … Oh, which brings me to my next question: when do you guys plan on opening up the market a little bit? You’re not the only company that’s just focusing on a local market at first, and it makes sense why you’re doing that; we could understand the reasons, but there are a lot of people of course, like myself and other people around the country who would like to get their hands on one of these vehicles. How long do we have to wait?

Marques: Well, it (inaudible) a lot more than the local market. I mean, I come out of the auto industry, and a lot of the new and provocative products that come out of all aspects of the auto industry usually get launched in California because of… One, there’s less sensitivity to seasons, there’s a great automotive subculture here. And then from a standpoint of a high efficiency vehicle, you’ve got one of the leaders in terms of regulation in this state, relative to the whole country. But we’ll start here, and we’ll probably be in California for anywhere from nine to twelve months, and we’ll start to slowly move across the country, into the places where people have demonstrated a propensity to buy high-efficiency vehicles. We’re definitely going to move… we’ll be in the southeast, up and down the east coast, and then as we make our way around the country, we’ll fill towards the middle.

Bo: Okay. And do both of you guys have your own Apteras that you’ve been driving?

Steve: Not yet. I was driving one. Our internal name for the vehicle is “Zen,” and I was driving that as my daily driver for, I don’t know, three to four months, and then…

Marques: We took it away from him.

Steve: Yeah, Marques took it away from me. (laughter) So now I have to go back to my Prius.

Bo: Ow, geez.

Steve: So, what’ll happen is, like I told you before, with the whole rollout plan, is as we continue to build these preproduction vehicles… actually, the first preproduction vehicle was completed yesterday, and we’ll be talking a bit about that to our newsletter readers and a little bit more to the public, but we’ll continue to build those vehicles, and like I said, we’ve got a kind of quarantine — they’re going to be evaluated for daily life, daily use, by the management team and the engineers here before we go live, so… we’ll put Steve back into his Aptera here pretty soon.

Bo: Lucky Steve.

(chuckling)

Ryan: Hey, I want to ask a second ‘What can consumers expect’ in terms of price for this vehicle. I know I’ve seen numbers ranging from the mid $20s to the mid $40s. That seems like kind of a large range. Have you guys kind of honed in any more than this large range?

Marques: We are honing in, but it’s not something we’re in a position to announce just yet. What I can say is that we’re going to offer the consumer throughout the product lineup… You know, we talked about the electric briefly, we talked about the hybrid briefly. We will have a number of powertrains. We will also have optional contents within the vehicle to make it… it helps you to cater your vehicle to your particular lifestyle, the way that you live and interact with your vehicle, whether it be, you know, ‘I need navigation in my vehicle’ or ‘I need (inaudible) sound system’ or ‘I need an extra cupholder’ or what have you. We’re going to try and do as good a job as possible of making Aptera delightful to interact with and delightful to own. So, you know, $25 to $45 is about the best that I can say in this five minutes, but as we get a little bit closer to launch, we’ll start announcing official pricing for each model.

Bo: Okay. And one final question I have for you that begs to be asked. Just, in this economy, this is a big concern from a lot of consumers, that a lot of these startups and companies are having serious financial trouble. How are you guys doing and what confidence can you give our listeners and the consumers that you guys are going to be around for a while?

Steve: Well, when we closed our round of funding last year, we raised enough money to get into production. Paul Wilbur, our CEO and the financial team is in the process of putting another round together, but we’re doing just fine. There’s no worries on our end. We raised enough last year to carry us through this downturn, and we’re just keeping our eyes on the prize right now.

Marques: One of the things I’ll add to Steve’s comment is that we believe, and one of the principles that we founded the company on, is that we create a value proposition that actually helps the average consumer in an economic situation like this. So, where there are other companies and other vehicles, whether they be traditional or new technology that are more discretionary or harder to rationalize in your daily budget, we think that Aptera actually brings something to your life that helps your life in the way that you use it and the way that you interact with your pocketbook. So, we think that, to some degree, what is happening in the economy right now actually plays to our favor.

Bo: Great.

Ryan: And how strong of a contender are you guys for the Automotive X-Prize?

Marques: Oh, there’s no other competitor. (laughter) I mean, you might as well stop with us.

Bo: (more laughter) That’s the attitude!

Ryan: Aptera was my prediction, wasn’t it though? (laughter).

Bo: It was. Well, best of luck to you guys. And when is that award? At the end of this year or the end of next year? 2009, 2010?

Marques: The competition starts in 2009.

Bo: It starts 2009.

Marques: Yep.

Bo: Okay. Alright — anything else that you guys would like to say about your car, your company?

Marques: Tell everybody that you know to call in and put down a deposit. (laughter) Aptera.com.

Bo: Aptera.com.

Marques: You will not be disappointed.

Bo: All right! Marques and Steve, thank you for taking the time and being with us, I really appreciate it. It’s an awesome looking car.

Ryan: Absolutely, we’re excited about it.

Bo: We’re very excited about it. And we hope we get a chance to drive it sometime here in Massachusetts.

Marques: We’re looking forward to it, actually.

Bo: Alright — thanks guys, you take care!

Ryan: Thanks, gentleman.

Marques: Alright, take care, you too.

Bo: Thanks, bye bye! (beat) And now we’ll continue talking about parades…
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Image credit: Aptera

For under $30,000, you will soon be able to buy an electric car with a 120 mile range, or a plug-in hybrid that gets 300 miles-per-gallon.

Sound like a fantasy, but this one could be coming to a dealer near you. Slated for release in late 2008, the company Aptera will be offering the initial limited release of their fully electric model Aptera Typ1, and the 300 mpg plug-in will follow in 2009.

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