If you follow this blog you might recall a while back I wrote about a car company called Aptera. I got super-excited about the product, tried to ask more questions, and hit a brick wall. The wall wasn’t so much about the company hiding things, as it was about the people fielding the questions not being trained on how to refer them to the people with the answers.
I ended that episode, and the following updates, promising that if I heard from Aptera again, I would let you know. Then I did hear from them, and I didn’t let you know. Not cool on me.
In fact I later got a very nice letter back, that specifically addressed my core questions. Well, maybe not fully answering, but framing expectations. I have to say, the use of exclamation points really helped to sell me. They’re excited!
I’m going to put the whole message below. I expect I’ll fail to match the well-formatted text I received. Just the look of the message indicates that some care was put into creating it. You will have to take my word for it.
Does this restore my faith in the venture? To be honest, it does, at least a little bit. My desire for an outfit like this to succeed has almost nothing to do with my own transport, and everything to do with making cities in the western United States less carbon-awful.
Anyway, here’s the full reply that I promised before.
Hi Jerry,
I sincerely apologize that they were not able to get your questions answered! We are more than happy to assist. To give you some clarity into the situation, we are required to use a third-party platform/company to accept investors’ funds and work with the SEC to ensure compliance. This is not directly managed in any way by Aptera. So when you email invest@aptera.us, it does not go to anyone on the Aptera team, it goes to an outsourced support team that specializes in financial inquiries related to the investing process.
Please find answers to your questions below:
• Strangely, the Gamma body was due in Q3, and supply chain sorting-out for Q3 and Q4. / Gamma production in Q4.
We had aspired to make a production-intent vehicle by the end of this year. We think we’re pushing that into next year, but hopefully not too far into next year. We’ve signed some significant agreements that we think will provide us parts in 2022 at a greater scale than we were anticipating before. So we think once we pull the trigger on manufacturing, we will be able to scale rapidly, and really start to crank out vehicles. But getting to that start of production is later than what we had expected at least a year or two ago. In addition, we do not have any plans to change pricing at this time.
• Have the “Betas vehicles” been built?
The Beta builds are underway! We have a new 80,000 sq. foot assembly facility which is complemented by two additional spaces nearby for beta development, R&D, and solar composite manufacturing. We look forward to sharing our progress with you as we continue this phase of testing and development. Please stay tuned for video updates on our social channels such as YouTube. Betas are in progress! Here is our November update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK-aamqGZS4.
• How is test validation going?
We look forward to sharing this with you over the next several months as we make more progress in the beta stage! We recently stepped into this phase and as progress is made we will provide updates directly from our CEOs Chris Anthony and Steve Fambro. We’re looking forward to announcing more information to our supporters. We are having all the betas being completed for the development vehicles to send to suppliers and validate production parts. The path to production did not happen as quickly as we had originally anticipated, but nevertheless, we are making great progress and cannot wait to launch.
Please let us know if you have any questions. We are more than happy to assist. We are committed to moving mobility in a direction of sustainability and innovation. We cannot thank you enough for your support.
The message was signed “Aptera Team”, and had a bunch of links to various social media.
At this point, with this message that really had very little of substance, I’m all excited again. Maybe this actually can be the car that breaks oil. Maybe this is the car that an inner-city grandma can afford to operate, and not have to worry about gas prices. It could be a game-changer.
Maybe it won’t be, but tonight at least, with all the things and whatnot gong on, I’d like to see this as part of a carbon exit strategy.
