Aptera Update 2024 from Chris Anthony (CEO) and our first test ride!
Smack hi I’m Patrick and I’m Le and this is the mai Vlog but today we’re at the headquarters of ABA in carlbad California to check out what their update is and to go for a ride woo let’s go as Patrick said we are here at the ABA headquarters which is fortunately 10
Miles from our house cbag California is so crazy cool we are going to go listen to Chris Anthony the CEO yes coo found founder and CEO share all about the newest updates what’s going on all the cold Tech answer questions like all intensive and we’re going to go for a
Test drive so let’s go welcome to beautiful Carl’s bed California um we’re uh we’re we’re super happy and proud to be such a big part of the electric vehicle association and uh it’s great to have everybody here to celebrate not just the successes of EVS
Over the last 10 years uh but also some of our progress um as we push towards production um I was going to give you a little intro to Aba I’m sure there’s probably a lot of questions so we’ll save most of the time for questions uh
We also have some some hand around so you can kind of get a feel for the work we’re doing here um for those of you that don’t know probably most of you have at least heard of aptera U maybe you don’t know what we’re all about uh but aptera exists to
Provide the world the most efficient Transportation um we started with really the math equation of where does energy go in people’s day-to-day Transportation uh and we found that over 60% of your fuel at highway speeds can go to just pushing air out of the way of a typical
SUV or or sedan so if you can really optimize your vehicle for aerodynamics you’re going to get much better fuel economy the second biggest loss is weight takes energy to deform your tire on every rotation so if you can have a lightweight vehicle even better and the
Last is really the efficiency of your powertrain so combustion engines as we all know are garbage when it comes to converting uh energy and to power to your wheels you only get like 25% of the energy out of the gasoline you burn to your wheels so it’s a shame to go
Through all that effort to dig up dinosaur bones and and you know compressed biomatter uh that could be so useful in Plastics and other areas and just burn it in combustion engines and Let It Go off into the sky never to be retrieved again um electric uh Motors
You know obviously much more efficient we take that to the next realm you know uh typical EVS get maybe 80% of their power from the wall to the wheels we get closer to 90% so you put all that together and you get something that looks more like a fish than a box truck
And something that gets extreme efficiency and because everybody here knows a vernacular we use less than 100 watt hours per mile so you know it’s uh it’s when compared to a Hummer EV you know we’re burning a six of the energy per mile uh and when it’s uh compared to some of you
Eco MERS out here um it’s a third to half of what you guys are using on the best day out in the world we wanted to show you a little bit about how the vehicle is coming together from an architecture perspective and Engineering perspective we’ve been doing
A lot of this work in Italy it’s our carbon fiber SMC chassis how the parts come together um an interesting thing is we only use six major parts for a body structure so there’s a tub there’s a top there’s two sides and some liner pieces and that’s the whole body structure for
This vehicle when we last tested this vehicle through fmvss crash test we had the highest roof Crush strength of any passenger car on the road and it’s only gotten better with our work in Italy so it’s a fabulous piece of engineering to see all these things come together and
This what you see on the screen will arrive here in just a couple months so we can finish up our first production intent builds and be able to drive people around and what is a fabulous new entry into the electric vehicle association this is the actual shop in
Italy um an amazing place where some of the world’s most premier supercars are made I don’t want to Rattle off the names but if if you’ve seen something pretty in a magazine that goes fast um it probably went at least part of it through one of cpc’s shops in
Italy um the carbon fiber SMC that we use is a very interesting material it’s it’s stamp pressed um imagine like a waffle iron that you put in a glob of thermoset resin and carbon fiber into and then you close the waffle iron and you wait 8 minutes and when you open the
Waffle iron you’ve got a beautiful aptera part that’s essentially how these parts are made uh but they’re carbon fiber they’re super strong uh and they’re used this material is used in a lot of pretty amazing supercars so it’s really cool to see our vehicle going for
That this is what it looks like and we’ll we’ll hand it around so everybody can can touch and feel and and see what carbon fiber SMC goodness is um but an important thing to note in that particular piece is with this process we get a part that’s really akin to an
Injection molded part so you can have embedded Fasteners so you don’t have to like glue on a stud or glue on a a nut it’s just made in the part um also has a lot of features so you can have you know little Landing features like this is
Where the HVAC sets the air handler box uh that blows the AC on you you can have little Landing feet you can have locating features uh you can even have like um um scribe lines for bonding when you need to bond two pieces together you
Can make it in the part um so so just a really amazing process and before this we had a very hand laid process so people would have to hand lay composite material in a mold and it it took a long time and I had a boat company we built a
Lot of boats but it took a lot of space and a lot of people so you know we have 46 over 46,000 orders for the UPA now uh so we need to build them in Mass people haven’t even seen a production vehicle yet so we’re sure that our orders will
Take off once we have a production vehicle so we we couldn’t do something that’s going to take hundreds and hundreds and thousands of square feet uh we can make um up to 100,000 aptera a year and about 30,000 square fet of space over in Italy so it’s really space
Constrained um and that’s with six operators so six people managing a whole plant making body structures for 100,000 Vehicles a year so it’s it’s much different than my my boat plant where we had hundreds of people and hundreds of thousands of square feet um these are some of the beautiful
Parts the guys are we’re putting together this was over a month ago we’ve come a long way since then and we’ve actually finished almost all of the tooling for the vehicle there now um I also recently got back from a trip to Korea um I had some pretty amazing food and uh they
Like to they like to torture the white guy with uh with whiskey and beer so I definitely had some adventurous nights out uh but we just signed a battery arrangement with a company called ctns there um and they will be building the robotics line to have a fully automated
Battery pack line in Korea where we’ll build our first couple hundred battery packs and then we’ll ship all that equipment here to the US and then we’ll be building battery packs right here in carlb California um that’s the same game we’re playing with CPC we want to build
The body parts uh in Italy to start and then we want to bring that equipment over to the us so we can have jobs here in the US to build those things and so we can have the parts located closer so we don’t get caught in a long supply
Chain uh way way way overseas uh ctns buil bu some of our first battery modules this is an example of one of the battery modules flipped upside down and this is right side up um our battery modules are cooled by base plate cooling uh we use 2170 cells which we’ll we’ll pass around
To these are the cells if you drove a Tesla Model y or model 3 here likely it has a 2170 nmc cell in here um it’s a lot like a doua battery only fatter uh but that’s what we populate our modules with and it takes six of these mod
Modules to make one epter battery pack how many uh good question uh there’s 2900 in the whole pack uh the math is above me to divide it by six but um but 500 500 cells or so a pack but if you but if you ever H if you haven’t ever held a cell
That’s in your Tesla this is what they are uh in your Tesla they have like three times as many cells as we do but about 9,000 10,000 cells and it’s out the pack uh nickel metal Cobalt so this in particular is an nmc 811 chemistry it’s a high nickel content
Chemistry that gives you really good energy density 600 1000 use taller cells yeah so a great thing we we’ve been working with Sandy Monroe and Monroe Associates to really optimize our pack and all of our manufacturing uh but they advised us you know don’t design four distinct packs
For your 250 mile 400 mile 600 M th000 mile uh design one pack and then if you can use a different size cell for those packs it makes everything much easier so we use a 70 mm tall cell here for the 400 mile range version we just take some
Of the cells out for the 250 mile range version and for the 600,000 mile range version we use taller cells so the cells that are going around are 70 millimet tall we go to a 90 millim tall and then 120 millim tall cell and that means we
Can use all the same cell brackets we can use the same power busting we can use the same pdu we can use the same case structure uh everything gets harmonized eyes and gets much much easier to build in volume uh you’ll see over here uh a new an old current
Collector but this is our new strategy um it’s actually laser welded to the battery cells and the laser is super super quick um the problem with uh some of the early Tesla packs is they were wire bonded and it takes a machine time to drop a wire lift it make a loop drop
The wire again and weld it on this laser stuff is just it’s h super super quick uh so you can bond this whole module uh in less than a minute uh whereas it used to take six how many volts uh each module is 50 to 60 volts the whole pack is 402 charge
Voltage 350 nominal um a little description on you know kind of how we’re evolving here uh in Italy we’re building our body structure we’re building the frame that’s under the body structure that holds our suspension um you know the the aptera is really built uh from the
Battery out so the batter is the heavy part of the vehicle we use a structural battery that then holds the front and rear suspension and then we put our pretty beautiful carbon fiber body structure on top of that the that will that work for the the the frame uh and
The body will happen in Italy to start and they will ship those over to us probably as full rollers you know with wheels so uh once it gets here uh we’ll be able to put the battery pack in the Solar on uh install you know some of our
Point of use controllers which is our digital IO system around the vehicle um and obviously our control systems software Center screen and stuff uh in Korea is where we’ll build our initial battery packs and those will be shipped here uh but eventually those battery packs will be the key here the battery
Packs will come off the line it’s the heaviest unit then that is really the first station of our assembly so station one is battery pack battery pack goes in frame station two body goes on the vehicle after that and then you just build up the rest of the vehicle uh
There’s a great simulation on this screen behind IND me here right in front of that big black box which is a solar testing box uh but that is a simulation of our manufacturing execution system so it’s digital software by in ratio that helps us manage the inventory coming out
Of the back where the shelves are way back there onto the line we have to do interesting things like track the serial number of every Tire we put on an aptera we have to keep that for life in case of warranty concerns uh we keep track of
You know the torque of every bolt that’s gone into an aptera um you know and obviously serialized every part that went into an aptera so once we have tens of thousands of vehicles out there if there’s a problem with the subset of vehicles we have the data to know oh the
Vendor shipped us the wrong part or oh the vendor had a quality issue and we only have to recall 100 Vehicles instead of recalling all 10,000 Vehicles which is nice so that that’s a pretty cool simulation and it’s good to see how the factory will actually operate if you get
A chance to to to peek over there and see that um uh the alaf wheels are in Slovenia which is pretty close to Italy so uh it’s only 4our drive so they can put them on a Lori what they call trucks over there um
And and drive it over to uh to Italy uh where this vehicle can be produced uh I wanted to leave a good amount of time for questions but I also wanted to um to give you a little um tour of the shop from your seats
Um big group is hard to manage on tours but uh this is an 880,000 ft facility it’s capable of building about 20,000 Vehicles a year uh the current line that you’ll see um animated on that show over there is a 12 station assembly and this blue line that you see running under the
Seats and then around the building that’s the actual vehicle assembly line so there’s 12 stations the TAC time is 12 minutes each we can produce about 40 epter a day per shift on those lines sh 8 hour shifts yes sir so if we uh were
To bump that to two shifts uh we can get about 20,000 Vehicles out the door per year um out of here um how we have the shop organized is up there behind the green wall that’s where all the mechanical engineers are uh that’s where body structures Arrow suspension chassis
All those guys and then we leave the electrical engineers downstairs because it’s more gloomy and they can have the lights low and uh uh for whatever reason the electrical engineers always like it dark because they’re always looking at schematics and stuff um but electrical engineers down here high voltage low
Voltage control system Solar charge controller um all that down here over here we have marketing uh and our amazing Community success team with Audra um and Chris uh who are here helping uh with this um our amazing marketing team has done a great job building our community um and so blessed
To have them um and uh uh this over here is you know accounting and finance and and all that stuff uh on the shop floor uh on this side over here you’ll see most of our solar assembly um so we have the equipment to produce about 10 panels
A day right now um uh um you’ll you’ll be able to kind of see the different forming equipment uh and then the different test equipment further down we test for temperature we test for breakage we have a big steel ball we drop on stuff we have a an ice gun that
Shoots ice at 90 miles hour so got to pass an ice test um all that fun stuff we’re really proud of our solar and uh I’ll pass these around as some some showand tell but these are some coupons of our our solar testing here I wait for
These guys to come around but uh but this came off of the forming equipment here uh and this is what produces this amazing glass solar panel and you wouldn’t think you know that this is glass but but it is uh and it’s a lot like the glass on your cell phone it’s
Super super tough super scratch resistant but surprisingly flexible um you know that means it’s also very lightweight but you know you can you can hold it up uh by just one hand one finger if I could balance more properly like a basketball star um but uh but you
Know we’ve made amazing progress on this and obviously one of the benef biggest benefits of having the most efficient vehicle platform ever is that you can add very little solar to it and still get very useful charge range out of it so we add 192 solar cells onto the body
Surface of our vehicle that get you about 700 watts of charging power and optimal sun and in Southern California you can get over 40 miles a day of free Power just from The Amazing nuclear generator in the sky that we have here that’s completely free and in total in
California Southern California you can get about a 11,000 miles a year of free driving no need to plug it in no need to pay your power bill all you have to do is trust that the sun is going to come up every day and provide you with that
Power in more dreary places like Seattle New York Boston you still get like 88500 years 8,500 miles a year of free driving so um in a world today where I see many articles of people spending over $5,000 a year on gasoline this thing is a pretty sweet deal at
$26,000 to not have a fuel bill ever again um it’s also a really cool adventure vehicle um this is the first vehicle that you can take on an adventure and it actually creates its own fuel when you’re out adventuring imagine taking a camping trip driving 200 miles away camping for a week and
Coming back with more power than you had in your upter than you left with yes sir opening now I have a safy question my wife wants me to live a long time okay how and where are the crash forces distributed across the vehicle um so we have a big crumple Zone in the
Front uh we actually have uh over 650 mm of crushable space in the front of the vehicle to get a five-star crash rate in the US you need about 550 millimet of crushable space uh we actually had the highest roof Crush strength of any passenger car on the road when we last
Tested it so rollover strength is great we got a big boxed out section by your AG Point most side impact injuries come at your hip uh so we did uh we did an extra job uh protecting that and obviously expect to do U really well on the full frontal and offset frontal
Crash test the offset frontal in particular uh basically is a glancing blow that that kind of takes the wheel off so we’re very unique in that we have a lot of mass outside of the vehicle where other companies have to account for the mass inside the vehicle so um
You know offset frontal and full frontal crash test have simulated very well and the simulations are very good now so uh we have gone through all those testing before but it was with a previous iteration of this vehicle um so the body structure was a good bit different so we
Have to retest now and we probably won’t get to that test testing till March or April uh but we will we will publish s that’s five vehicles get uh that’s a good question I think we’re down to four now um you know the cool thing is that
If you don’t obliterate the vehicle in one crash test you can use it for another crash test uh so like the full frontal crash test we don’t think it’s going to damage the vehicle very much so then you can actually use it for the side impact too so
Um yeah an independent third party company we’ll take it through the test and and and do all that it’s not cheap but that’s what we’ll do and how about pedestrian uh yeah pedestrian crash is mostly in the in the very pointy nose part of it our our vehicle is very low
Um a lot of what happens is the occupant uh you know slams their head against uh the the hood uh when you have an engine that’s very high in the hood there’s no way for it to crush down so you bounce off the engine basically we don’t have
Any of that in the front of our vehicle so pedestrian safety is is quite unique in this vehicle well more of a bouncy blow so instead of uh instead of hitting something hard you hit something relatively soft but strength and weight question about carbon fibers handling that little piece that it’s so powerful
Yes yes that was all like steel or whatever how much like weight and what’s the uh it’s about nine times stronger than steel by weight uh but it really is how you design a composite part composite parts do good in box section boxed sections um so really it’s more
Often about the geometry of the part than the actual material quality these are the part and you know historically Automotive companies have tried to shift from aluminum to steel but they just Tred to replicate the Steel part with some other material and that’s not the
Way to do it if you’re going to design a carbon fiber vehicle you have to design the chassis from the ground up and it has to be you know very unique for the material properties the great thing about fiber is you can you can transmit load from one area to another area of
The vehicle uh steel and aluminum they just deform so there are benefits to to stealing aluminum uh for sure uh but for our chassis you know know nine times stronger than steel sounds great and follow up on that quickly is what kind of chemical um environmental impact from
Creating that carbon fiber uh the cool thing about the carbon fiber there’s very little waste uh there’s less than a half a percent of trimmings when you actually produce the part there’s a little flashing that comes out of the side like when you injection mold a part
You get like a little slag on the side uh so they cut that off and you can actually recycle that material up to five times back into a structural part um so from an environmental perspective it’s it’s a it’s a quality material you use almost all of it there’s not a lot
Of recycle um you know in steel and aluminum and even the old hand laid composits you know the waste can be up to 30% of your material so you know we hate for you know any material that goes into the aptera to be wasted the cool
Thing about an aptera because it uses so little energy per mile and it’s so little weight what you start with from a transportation device has already impacted the Earth much much less our battery pack is a quarter of the average battery pack you know 25 KW hour battery
Pack is going to get you 250 plus miles a range so when you’re when you do that and you use much less material to create the device to create your vehicle from the start you’re just starting in a much better place for the environment and every mile you drive you’re using less
Energy so but thank you yes sir uh can you comment on the development production the chassis uh yeah in uh in Italy they’re used to making these uh these crazy uh carbon fiber uh unibody chassis uh we considered a monoco chassis much more like an aircraft a serious aircraft is a
Monoco structure uh but you know they have lots of great um uh forging capabilities in Italy too so forging a lot of the pieces for the frame and the suspension and all that’s going to happen in Italy and then come to us basically as one unit a rolling chassis
Is what they call it but basically the body structure the glazing which is the glass the doors the seals the hinges uh the suspension the wheels and then we’ll get it here in that form and then have to put in the battery pack and put on
The solar and put in the electronics uh that’s the name of the game is is get that whole body structure from Italy and then bring it here and assemble the rest of the vehicle yes sir uh you mentioned ear prec for the battery are you guys going to have some system in place
Like most certainly so the precondition will be automatic uh the precondition will be automatic if you select a charging Point yes or you can do it from the app we do we do hope to have an app in probably a couple months uh but we’re
Going to unveil the app first so we can get a lot of people testing the app you can download on your phone you won’t you can have a virtual vehicle that you can go to you don’t have your vehicle yet but hopefully get a lot of feedback from that but yeah on
Repairability insurance rates are high on Teslas because of their habit of getting total relatively minor accidents is that going to be addressed both with the insurance industry and in service centers uh it’s a great question kind of a softball we’re a right to repair company so uh you know years ago
People got really mad at Apple because you can’t replace the battery in your phone uh then it became apparent like hold on I buy these things but I don’t really control the long-term future of these things I can’t change my battery I can’t do anything we we are we are not
Those guys we are a right to repair company uh which means that when you buy an aptera we give you all the information and parts resources you need to keep that upter on the road so if you call us we’re going to send you a part
Within 24 hours of you needing one and we’re going to give you the information on how to fix it so if you’re in the middle of Australia and you’re by you’re not anywhere close to an ABA service facility you can still go to a local mechanic um or local service shop or you
Can do the repair yourself uh which I’ve had problems with my Tesla and Tesla has amazing service in Southern California in my opinion uh but even then you got to schedule an appointment you got to leave a window for guy to come um I’m like well this is a window
Regulator I could have replaced that in 5 minutes yet I had to I had to slate Out 3 hours of my day to wait for the service guy tremendous service in general regards but for a lot of little things you can imagine that maybe you just want to do it yourself in the
Bigger picture uh impact resistance and stuff like that uh I don’t know if you remember a vehicle called the Saturn uh but they had they had SMC doors and it wasn’t carbon fiber SMC it was glass SMC but there was commercials of people hitting with a sledgehammer and shopping
Cards and you get in minor accidents and and nothing would happen to the Saturn because the because the durability and the toughness of the material was such uh that’s the case that will be in that you’ll have to get into something pretty extreme to damage a part uh but if you
Do damage a part we have a very modular vehicle build so everything’s built in modules so you know worst case scenarios you’re you’re you’re literally replacing the mono structure of the vehicle uh but that mono structure is you know less than $10,000 so you know if you take the
Front quarter off of a regular vehicle you’re probably in the $5 to $20,000 of damage range which is why electric vehicles get total so much uh rear quarter front quarter you name it if you damage a quarter of the vehicle they don’t put on a new quarter the cool
Thing about our vehicle is everything’s lightweight at almost any mechanic shop you can take off all the parts yourself or with very light equipment and actually fix the APPA very quickly and easily so uh we’re proud to be a right to repair company uh and we’re proud to
Kind of have a vehicle that has the toughness and durability to stand up but also if it is broken the modularity to be able to fix it quicker hope that answers the question longwinded answer to you but motorcyc uh yes this is considered a motorcycle so three wheels in America
Gets you in the HOV lane for free and it’s classified as a motorcycle so we get to use this really small plate in the back but because it has three wheels you don’t have to have a motorcycle license and because it has something over your head you don’t have to wear a helmet
So so uh you talked about how the body manufacturing and the battery assembly just coming to us uh I think you mentioned some time ago that Al also might be coming to us uhuh yeah alaf makes our inhe Motors they’re built in Slovenia now they have amazing
Technologies uh we also have a plan to build those Motors here in the US too um it’s a little simpler than a lot of the other stuff we’re seeing as a challenge but you know they’re and like in from that green Pole to that green pole we
Can build 20,000 Motors a year so it’s not it’s not a lot of space to BU those yes sir so practical question if you get a flatten back how you change um the side panel of the the rear wheel skirt comes off so you can change the rear
Tire and these front guys they actually flip up like Lamborghini doors so you can get to those tires so if you have to put air in them or if you have to change the whole tire you just flip that outside cover uh the cool thing about
The front wheel pants is these uh these front and rear parts are fungible they’re foam so you can take them off if you want to go off-roading but also if you damage them they’re only you know $30 part Parts uh so you know that there’s something that you can upgrade
Over time you could probably make them pink or whatever too if you wanted to add some accents as well yes sir uh how will wheel alignment work is it something that will just be after service uh yeah a typical wheel alignment shop can do the wheel alignment it’s adjusted you know typical
Tie rod just like just like older vehicles but uh uh there will be some special instructions on how to set the rear wheel so if you go to a four-wheel shop they already know where to set the rear wheel side to side you’re going to take this to somebody going be like what
Did Sam Hil so you have to have some instructions on how to do that but yes yes sir will it take Tire CES over to the Sierra uh it will yeah yeah will the horsepower vary with the battery pack size and also about 48 uh yes the the battery pack size does make
The vehicle behave a little different the heavier battery packs aren’t as quick 0 to 60 those types of things uh we have to have different spring rates and stuff for the bigger battery packs uh so it’s not a different horsepower uh but it is a different feel for the
Vehicle if that Mak makes sense we don’t change the drivetrain for the bigger battery packs you just get the bigger battery pack so you get more range but a little less performance uh he also asked about a 48 volt system uh Tesla’s done really cool thing they’ve introduced a
48volt power bust to their low voltage side uh that reduces the copper in your system uh which is great uh we’ve already gone to a point of use controller system so we have little control boards all over the vehicle so our wiring harness only consists of a power ground and communication wire so
We already have a wiring harnesses that’s 30% of the weight of a typical EV wiring harness on the low voltage side so the bang for our buck to go to 48 volts isn’t as much and Elon has lots of cash so he can pay to develop 48volt
Devices but there’s not a supply chain for 48 volt devices right now so we can’t go out to a supplier and say hey you got a 48 volt thing they’re like no piss off or pay us a lot of money to develop it so um so we’re not in the 48
Volt game but we hope that the industry goes there and then one day we can we can be there way in the back sorry to be ignoring people but can you talk a little bit about your thinking about temperature management of the battery in the cabin and do you do temperature
Management of the battery while the vehicle is off uh we do cold management when the when the battery’s off so if it’s a really cold day uh we’ll keep the battery pack above freezing obviously you don’t want to use too much power to do that um you know our our battery
System is adiabatic so you know we try to um use as little heat as possible to just keep it above freezing uh but we have systems in place to manage to manage that and in the interior you can precondition it with your app so if
It’s a cold day you can you can warm it up before you get to get in the vehicle so some of us have started CA Congress people we’ the Congress members who sit on the besides writing those letter what else can we do earn $7500 tax oh thank
You so much for the question I uh I I would love for the aptera to exist in a regime where we could get the $7,500 federal tax credit we are three wheels we’re considered a motorcycle so we are outside of that regime uh the state of California still
Has some cool incentives there’s even cooler incentives up in Oregon uh but yeah if you if you have connections to political Representatives or anyone in your community that might have influence please share our story um you know the more aptera followers and fans we have
Uh the better our life is going to be but um you know uh you can never overestimate our government’s ability to fail uh on making the world better place uh you know politicians aren’t in the game uh for long-term strategies and we’re in it for the long term we want to
I want my grandkids to have inherit a better Planet uh and this is a way to do it uh so yes if you have any influence please uh uh please spread the word but uh I appreciate everybody’s time and hearing and learning about EPA our
Website is epa. us so if you want to hit that up uh to see what we’re all about um let me know if you guys uh I’m sure we have an EV Association code so you guys can get 30% off of your off of your pre-order if you want to pre-order but
Uh I’m so happy to host you guys and I know you’ll have a fabulous day with us so uh if you see me around feel free to ask me any questions that you guys have but thank you so much thank [Applause] you this is our battery pack uh as we’re
Producing it for our first launch Vehicles this 45 Kow hour battery is the standard Pack full of these 2170 cells if we want to make a smaller pack a 25 Kil pack which will get us about 250 M range we just depopulate some of the parallel groups in each of these battery
Modules so uh take out you know 40 50% of the batteries and now you’re down in capacity um for that smaller pack for the bigger pack the 66 K pack we use these cells in 90 mm tall so these are 70 mm tall right now the 66 K hour pack
Is 90 mm tall and the 100 Kil hour pack is 120 millim tall so a lot taller cell but what that allows us to do is we use the same power distribution unit the same battery management computers for everything the same power busting the same cell brackets the same uh cell case
And architecture it really harmonizes all of our different battery pack designs uh this battery module over here is one that’s already wirebonded this one here was a very early R&D version of what we’re doing um and this right here is a 3D print it’s not the actual one of
The battery management computer that goes on each battery module here um I’ve got a great legacy in battery management and started my other lithium battery company on the back of a battery management design like this and we’ve evolved it mightily to do a lot of cool things but
Any battery pack fire that you’ve ever heard of in the EV industry was caused because the battery management system failed this computer is supposed to tell everything else in your vehicle hey there’s a problem stop doing whatever you’re doing so whether you’re discharging too fast or charging too
Fast or it’s uh too cold or whatever this is the computer that that manages this guy and it’s really you know the the basics of EV technology that when this thing works right your battery packs are infinitely safe uh we’ll walk over here and talk about our body structures a little uh
But this is the SMC outer panel of the aptera so we talked about the carbon fiber SMC and we passed around that part earlier which was black uh so that’s a similar part to this except it has carbon fiber this is glass SMC but this is what’s on the exterior of the attera
Uh and the cool thing about the EPA is we actually got rid of all the paint on the EPA no part of the EPA is painted uh in a modern Automotive plant you can spend half of the Capital Equipment expenditures for the plant just on your paint
Shop and 80% of the emissions from a modern Automotive plant is just from the paint shop so we got rid of paint we don’t paint and good luck getting a paint shop permitted in Southern California not going to happen so um so we take panels like this and we put a
Vinyl coating on them it’s a wrap like you’ve seen Tesla does it from the factory for uh the model S and x and now the Cyber truck uh there are a couple other um automobile manufacturers that that ship from the factory with the wrap but you’ll see a lot of supercars come
Out and then they have fancy wraps like the uh um Gucci Prince or pink or what was the uh what was the nanat one with dead now yeah so when you get your aptera you can wrap it whatever color you want and we’ll send you the cut
Pattern so you can take your aptera to a local cut shop and they’ll cut the vinyl for you and hopefully for just a couple hundred bucks they’ll basically be able to put that vinyl sticker on your aptera and you can have it be whatever you want
Um RB pink um all the way to death metal gray I was going to maybe show you these solar cells down here next and then talk about how they actually fit together with their solar panels so these are solar cells these solar cells are provided to us from a company called
Maxion in the Philippines uh you can see these solar cells are very flexible uh it’s cool that they’re very flexible because it is actually a monoc crystal on the top of the solar cell 50 Micron monocrystal of solar but it’s still pretty flexible another cool thing about
It is it’s an IBC cell so there’s a copper Matrix on the back of the cell um I want to do a live demo here do the live so so the cool thing about having the copper Matrix on the back is one it helps hold it together to be a little
More flexible two because of the copper Matrix we can not only Flex it in one um angle we can Flex it in two so a lot of things like to be flexible in one plane if you try to flex it in two planes at once no bueno uh but because of this
Copper Matrix we can actually Flex it about a millimeter and a half on each Corner which is great for us and if you break one of these SS cells there’s your life um you you actually still have the cell held together in the back by the copper
Matrix so if uh if you have a you know a crazy hail storm or you know some um baseball incident or something that cracks one of your solar cells on the attera the old style solar cells as soon as you crack the monocrystal your cell was dead it turned into a resistor it
Kills your whole panel uh but these guys this actually produces a significant amount of power you know maybe 90% of the power at originally did even though it’s broken so very fault tolerant kind of cell technology um we have some equipment at the end of the line down
Here that big white box down there uh we actually bought from sunow which used to build with maxion solar cells huge supplier of residential solar cells uh we bought that machine to actually string together our solar cells here but it uh it electrically strings together these
Cells and then we have a white robot down there maybe hard to that little white robot there it actually picks up these strings and then puts them into an assembly like this and then that yellow robot actually picks up this whole assembly and then puts it into a form
Which is the bottom sides glass and then there’s different polymer separators and the cells go in between it and then it goes into that white and green machine that’s behind this rack of things that Chris will run over to uh but that white and green machine with the green racing
Stripes W there you go um that’s actually what forms a big panel like this so it’s uh through heat and pressure in vacuum uh vacuums it all together and then you end up with a big panel and a lot like a laminated windshield um in traditional Automotive once it’s laminated together it’s good
For life so uh this is actually a production intense version of our hood and you can see how flexible and lightweight it is um it’s really amazing what they’ve been able to do with uh with glass these days uh you’ll notice on your cell phone cell phones really
Scratch resistant these days we’re using the same kind of Technology here uh to make sure that have terra’s panels are lightweight uh and super super scratch resistant so um we’ll go over and look at this simulation right here on these screens uh and then that will pretty
Much be the end of the tour um here we’re very data driven company so we have theill tools for our design uh killas what we used for our CAD software that CAD design rolls into a product life management software and that manages how we evolve the design over
Time then that design is released to an enterprise resource planning software called Nets Suite all of our purchase orders and financials are are issued out of netw Suite now a cool thing to note for everyone here is we’re P be audited sock compliant a very public ready
Company those we data driven and then that Erp system actually flows into this which is called a manufacturing execution system now you have a lot of Buzz words to go back and tell your friends but manufacturing execution is how it manages the inventory that comes out of inventory and goes on your
Manufacturing floor to build your vehicles and everything’s recorded every battery cell that goes into the battery pack the serial number it’s recorded every bolt that goes in has the serial number the torque is recorded how much you torque that bolt down every tire has a serial number you uh record the serial
Number that’s on the tire you record the PSI that you fill that tire to um so very very um data driven manufacturing that gives you a bunch of things in the future to refer to so if there’s a problem with some particular part you know when that particular series of
Parts went in and then five years down the road if there’s problems with those parts you can refer back to the dad and say okay looks like this problem was between vehicle 20,500 and 20650 so you only have to recall 150 Vehicles instead of recalling all 26,000
I know you guys see on the news you know GM recalling 650,000 vehicles we don’t ever want to be in this situation and this is how you do it um you you you PL you plan uh for a very lean manufacturing and you record everything that goes into the vehicle and keep very
Good data uh from there uh Rowan Associates helped us take this assembly ideology and put it into this visualization of how our plant will work so this is the plant that you’re setting in now those are the inventory shelves are in that very back corner this is the
Vehicle assembly line the blue line that’s kind of gone around you seen and then in the middle we have our battery line which is right here and then our our solar line which is on this side so in this facility we’re able to do batteries solar panel and Vehicle
Assembly for about 40 vehicles per shift which is about 10,000 Vehicles a year or with two shifts we can do 80 Vehicles a day which is about 20,000 Vehicles a year out of this facility might ask well once you’re run three shifts well there’s a little Logistics problem you can only get stuff
In and out of this building so quick if we were in a better building somewhere else that had more land and more ability for trucks to drive in and out maybe we could do 26 or 30 ,000 Vehicles a year out of a facility like this but we hope
To make this the model and then we hope to have plants uh in San Francisco and Texas and Virginia and the Netherlands and Australia and Germany so the idea is to have eight of these facility plant around the world by 2028 uh and to be building about 150,000 Vehicles a year
By 20130 and to deliver a million app teras by 2033 oh this facility uh ,000 s ft up top here is mechanical engineering so uh aerodynamics body structures suspension chassis down below here uh in in the depressing light is the electrical engineers they all like it dreary and
Dark uh they’re always looking at schematics um so uh down here they do high voltage low voltage firmware user interface uh up top here we have our a brilliant marketing team and communication team uh and accounting and then down here is all for just assembly space so cool that is the
Facility y great opportunities you have when you are with the electric vehicle association so I’m so proud to be a board member here and I’m gonna check out the new aa oh matchy matchy you don’t see a lot of pink in this today join yeah I’m so highly
Recommend let’s go let’s go oh my goodness dude you’re whipping it yeah do you want me to whip it or you want me to yeah whip it that’s oh my gosh no kidding it’s very locked in oh my gosh it’s a this is Bonker vehicle cool huh yeah it’s
Cool oh my gosh Charing right now even while we’re doing all this yeah you are a sunny day it’s gorgeous I feel like you’ve done this before I did a lot you made it so quick you can tell though like the suspension is really cool you it’s amazing it feels
Awesome so that’s so good excited about that oh I love this and this is way comfy I’m so sorry that was so quick but thank you very much head room and all that yeah thank you for the ride problem just give that have a great time I’ll
Give the button a Boop I shall Boop it wait where where there it is booped oh snap amazing oh my goodness well we just did this that here it comes told you it looks chill it was not chill hopefully we managed to capture it properly but that was crazy I know I
Didn’t do a good job filming uh we actually just rode in it just in the parking lot because they’re trying to get um we’ll show you a whole line of people the whole crowd of people there everybody’s trying to get uh just a brief ride in it hopefully we get to
Come back and like do a longer ride but I was uh impressed with the little short ride um it’s really hard to tell about the Comfort or anything like that but I had a tremendous amount of leg room yes um but I think the thing that surprised
Me the most is like it it felt like we didn’t even slow down for the the corners absolutely not uh yeah he was really whipping it you probably heard the squealing tires hopefully but it felt really stable uh which I think is a question I had at least with the
Three-wheel vehicle like how would it feel and he went on a really tight turn much faster than any of us would probably do and it felt really good yeah it was um you know one of my concerns you know seeing anything three-wheel is like does
It flip over easy yeah and you know this the definitely the answer is here he comes again oh I know I was just watching that oh no they well they got in the way of the of the screeching yeah well that messed that up but I mean it’s it looks really
Stable it feels really stable inside it feels much more comfortable than I thought it would I personally like an SUV so I tend to like to sit up with my legs like bent like this the uh UPA makes you almost lying down but in a very comfortable way I was kind of
Concerned about it but sort of like how the the ti can the Porsche Tai can you’re down this actually felt a lot more open like the ti can can be a little it’s like sporty and Clos in this felt like quite open and relaxed in a light roomier anyways it was just a
Quick brief introduction so uh hopefully spend more time hopefully get some more time but uh very good information here today hearing uh you know like a status update of aptera U exciting things are happening um as always you know they need funding to get into production um
But you can see like the engineering is solid their prototypes are solid and um they’re you know starting the process of getting into production which is really a big hurdle for any startup EV startup and you know I think they’re going to pull it off um I’m optimistic very
Optimistic and hopefully we’ll see some cars if not by the end of this year uh by the end uh by the beginning of 2025 mine says 25 for delivery yeah we’ll see I mean this is the this is the hard part you know uh we’ve talked about
On numerous videos it’s like building a prototype is easy it’s not but building a prototype is easy getting into production is very hard and getting into production at scale is extremely hard so um they they they have all the pieces in place I’m really stoked that you know
Attera is literally 10 miles from her house so my dad lives right there yeah D around the corner so uh anyways um we’re gonna have to come have a closer look that that’s our brief intro brief ride in ABA um we’re going to try and come
And and take a longer tour thank you guys for watching if you have any questions uh drop them down below we’ll see if we can get those answered if we get to do another visit um what else um I I have no idea um we just say thank you to our
Patrons we appreciate you guys so very very much your name is are scrolling across the screen right now and just remember that whatever you drive whether it is powered by the sun like an abara which is super awesome being powered right now today yes or not enjoy the ride bye
At the recent meeting of the Electric Vehicle Association at the HQ of Aptera, we got an update from Co-CEO Chris Anthony. He also hosted a lengthy Q&A session. We also got to do a quick test ride in an Aptera.
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