Aptera May Handle Winter Better Than You Think
You know there’s rightfully a lot of skepticism surrounding aptera and its performance in the real world because we haven’t hit mass production yet but the pi builds should be coming within the next couple months but as we’ve talked about how apter’s efficiency equation makes a lot of sense at least on paper
Still a very common criticism I see a lot with the aptera is oh well this thing’s not going to do well in the winter which once again I feel like is not usually based by that much logic or much research it’s just kind of a gut feeling it’s such a different vehicle it
Look so radically bizarre compared to everything else on the road so it must have some shortcomings it must have some drawbacks and I’m not trying to say that this will be perfect in all situations but sorry I have to disagree with a lot of people and I know we’re going through
You know a pretty mean winter across the United States so it’s on a lot of people’s mind right now especially with a lot of the negative EV coverage we saw in Chicago kind of just a three strike situation where you had uninformed EV drivers that didn’t know how to
Precondition or didn’t have a way to charge from home and you also had a lot of new Tesla customers with lfp battery packs that weren’t able to precondition their batteries on their way to the superchargers then of course your range gets cut in half when you’re driving around in the freezing cold battery
Packs don’t perform as well when it gets super cold so there’s just a lot of negative EV coverage in general so I think a lot of that got redirected towards EPA as well but I just wanted to remind everybody a few facts about the ABA that might actually give it some
Advantages over the traditional EV for one at least their launch edition vehicle are not going to be using lithium iron phosphate which is not a bad battery Chemistry by any means my personal vehicle that I drive every day has a lithium iron phosphate battery but one of the few disadvantages it has is
That it very rarely gets hot and batteries in order to operate properly have to be at kind of a warmer temperature and that has resulted in a lot of people getting slower DC fast charging speeds in the winter because the heat pump in the car has to work
Really really hard to heat up that battery pack because it’s such a stable chemistry it’s a lower energy density which again has a lot of advantages but lfp typically doesn’t perform all that great in the cold compared to nmc and aptera is relying on nickel manganese and Cobalt for their batteries at least
All of the ones that they’ve announced thus far maybe they’ll switch to lfp in the future but the good news is that battery pack can be actively heated through their HVAC system Chris Anthony has talked about that in recent interviews so they can heat up the battery pack actively which is good and
Another huge advantage that I don’t think get talked about enough in regards to the aptera is the fact that the main body structure is primarily made of carbon fiber which does not transfer heat or energy as well as most vehicle exteriors because most of our cars were
Used to being made of aluminum or steel usually a combination of the two and the carbon fiber body basically acts like a thermos for the cabin which means both good news for the summer months and the winter months as in when you heat up the
Cabin first of all it’s not a very large cabin compared to a traditional vehicle you don’t have a second row so you don’t have to the move ventilation all the way to the back so the HVAC system doesn’t have to work as hard as it does in traditional EVS which have larger cabins
To cool but also because of that carbon fiber body and not having the glass roof like a lot of our EVS have these days it means that the heat that you pump into the aptera cabin won’t Escape as easily as it does with traditional Vehicles so
It should retain heat very well and that means that the HVAC doesn’t have to work as hard as it would in a more traditional EV or any car really so if you’re warm on the inside it’ll stay warmer for longer assuming you’re not opening the doors or rolling down the
Windows but I do think the smaller amount of glass used and that carbon fiber body structure should have a lot of advantages that not everybody’s factoring in yet and lastly by far the most common worry I’ve seen a lot of people have is simply because of the three-wheel design people think well
Must not be good in the winter because there’s three wheels and that’s not like my car which has four wheels right so therefore four wheels better well one inherent Advantage is at least with the launch edition Vehicles it seems like because apura relies on on cheaper more efficient smaller Motors it’s not that
Expensive to opt for the all-wheel drive variant compared to other EVS out there usually you have to spend an extra five six or maybe $110,000 to get an extra motor in the back with the aptera the launch edition is all-wheel drive so you’re getting traction independently directed to each wheel of the vehicle
And like any other EV it has a low center of gravity yes it’s much lighter than a lot of vehicles but still the vast majority of the weight of the aptera is all at the bottom it’s in a centrally located position which means that it should be pretty easy to
Distribute weight across each tire and then of course independently move each one as you need to in a slippery situation and then a lot of people are obviously concerned about those wheel pants right because they’re covering up the wheels and people are thinking about those snowy climates where kind of snow
Builds up in the wheel well but there’s a very very keen difference between what goes on in most vehicles in the snow and the aptera which the aptera yes has very differently mounted Wheels on the front than a tradition traditional vehicle and those wheel pants keep them aerodynamic
But those wheel pants are locked in place with those Wheels which means as the wheels are going up and down the wheel pant is also traveling with it which does not currently happen really on any vehicles that we’ve seen most wheel wells are kind of locked in place
And then the suspension moves the tire up and down so you get a lot of resistance and back and forth motion between ice or snow that builds up in the wheel well whereas the aptera for one they’re moving in conjunction with each other so sure I’m well aware snow
Is probably going to build up in those wheel pants but it’s not going to resist against the tire as much as it does with a traditional vehicle because the wheel pant and the tire are moving in conjunction with each other and the other advantage that I don’t see as many
People acknowledging is the fact that aptera is one of the few EVS that is intending to have inhub Motors there’s a lot of efficiency advantages there by just applying the power directly to the tire instead of to an axle that’s moving the tire there’s slightly more losses
With that system but the other Advantage is that the motors themselves elv being in the tire are naturally hot that’s just what electric motors do they’re still much more efficient than internal combustion engine for sure but there’s still some passive heat particularly right around these motors so as you’re
Driving the aptera around the insides of those wheel pants I don’t know the official measurement but this would be a great question to ask aptera if you ever get the chance they’re very vocal by the way they’re not afraid to answer any questions you may have for them so I
Have it on my list but it’s not unusual for electric motors to easily surpass 150° f and you cover that motor with those externally mounted wheel pants and it’s probably going to be pretty hot in there which means that any snow or ice buildup is probably not going to stick
Around very long just that natural heat that the electric motors generate just from you driving around a little bit is probably going to melt a lot of that snow in ice anyway so I don’t think there’s going to be as much of a problem in the winter as a lot of people are
Assuming I’m sure it won’t be perfect there’s always disadvantages when you have a lower ground clearance but images of the aptera can be deceiving I think a lot of people just assume that the ground clearance is super low but they’ve told us with the production builds that it’s about 5.2 in which
Makes it about half an inch shorter than a model 3 and there’s definitely a lot of people driving around model 3s in the winter attera will also still have abs systems in place so that might be a little bit different with three- Wheels but again I think a lot of people should
Remember that it’s not always up to the vehicle there’s a lot of vehicles that may not be all-wheel drive or may not have a lot of the advantages of the aptera carbon fiber body or the passively heated wheel pants but a lot of the time it simply comes down to
Tires and aptera is using traditional off- the-shelf tires that everybody’s going to have access to they’ve publicly disclosed the dimensions of those tires so you should have no problem getting yourself a pair of snow tires for better grip for the aptera and sure a three-wheeler is definitely going to
Make it harder to avoid any potholes you run into but the general consensus I try to remind people is that living in the winter where there’s black ice and snow all vehicles can have problems sadly my sister was just recently in a car crash due to black ice on the freeway that no
One was able to see there was a massive car pile up she’s fine thankfully but still they had snow tires on the vehicle and it’s all-wheel drive and everything so it can happen to anybody and there’s always going to be challenges and complications with any vehicle that’s driving around in harsh conditions
Particularly the extreme cold but the aptera still has a lot of built-in advantages that translate even in those colder climates like a lot of people were frustrated with EVS in the winter because they’re already somewhat lower range relative to gas vehicles was cut in half so now your 250 mile range model
3 becomes a 12 5 mile range model 3 but a lot of those efficiency advantages between the electric motors and the more aerodynamic shape still translate in the winter which is why I think the aptera still might be a lot of people’s go-to in the colder climates because you
Traditionally have much higher range with the aptera so the launch edition is 400 Mi you get cut in half to 200 Mi which is still pretty reasonable for an electric vehicle of course and if you really drive around in the winter a lot and you live in a super cold climate you
Might want to consider the 600 mile range aptera cut that in half in the winter you still have 300 M of range or if you’re really crazy you could spec up for the 1,000 mile range app Tera and then even in the freezing cold if you
Lose 60 to 70% of your range you’re still getting 300 miles that’s going to be way way further than probably any EV is going to get on a charge and also probably way further than most gas vehicles are going to get in those same conditions so I’m sure there’s not no
Disadvantages I just want to highlight some of the ways that the aptera still might be able to get by in the winter we briefly saw them driving around the GMA prototype over in Europe in the snow and I think it’ll do okay I think a lot of people are just assuming because it’s
Weird and because it has solar cells therefore it’s not good in the winter but energy is still energy you still have to pay for electricity even in the colder climate so even if you’re not bringing in that much solar energy on the aptera it’s still going to cost less
To drive around than any other vehicle that’s for sure and unlike other three-wheelers out there the aptera is an enclosed cabin so you’re not going to be having to bundle up as crazy as you would if you tried to drive around an aramoto or an open air vehicle in the
Cold like yeah that’s just not going to work but in the aptera it would of course you can precondition it from the mobile app and do all those great things we’re used to doing with our EVS but are there other issues you guys are worried about in regards to how the aptera
Performs in the cold I’m happy to speculate along with you and hopefully get some real world answers with the pi builds being assembled within the next couple of weeks so thanks again to everybody supporting this channel directly seriously helps us out a ton as does just watching these videos so
Thanks again have an excellent rest of your day
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