[Big Dave]

If Aptera is going to make a go of it, they need to drop the electric self-delusion. There is no battery out there that will defeat the IC engine.

Because of the worldwide downturn in car sales they can go out and get engines/transmissions at a reasonable price today. (No guarantees five years down the line). Engines and transmissions are the componenets that separate real players from the wannabes. Lack of engine/transmission sourcing killed brands like DeLorean, Bricklin, Tucker, Studebaker, Packard, and Kaiser.

Aptera has to get a product out on the market. The world only has so much tolerance for vaporware and Aptera is approaching that tolerance limit.

The Aptera should excel at service for the guy who commutes alone and drives more than 25 miles one-way on a relatively high speed road. Those beautiful aerodynamics are useless in stoplight-to-stoplight city driving. Live in the city? Get an X-Box or Smart. They are easy to park and their hopeless aerodynamics don’t hurt them at all.

From what I gather, you couldn’t get a woman into an Aptera at gunpoint. They are half the market (at least) and they are the biggest fans of SUVs.

You have to sell a certain volume just to cover fixed costs. The Ford Excursion had a high per-unit profit margin, but the thing was so pricey that they could not sell more than 15,000 units a year, and that wouldn’t cover the fixed costs of a separate line at Louisville, even though it shared a lot of the components of their popular Super Duty trucks, made at the same assembly plant.

But you also have to make a good per-unit profit. Honda discontinued the original Insight (still a formidable MPG machine) because they lost their shirt on every unit. Corvette is evergreen because it is the most profitable per-unit vehicle on the planet and they do sell enough volume to cover fixed costs.

The auto biz is tough. The last US automaker to be started from nothing was Chevrolet. A lot of people have tried and failed since then. Billy Durant and Henry Ford were a lot smarter than many people give them credit for. Aptera is like a small, slow rookie in the NFL. They better be able to hit every field goal attempt as they try to grow into real players. The tolerance for mistakes is very limited in the car biz.