That is it for Aptera
 

That is it for Aptera

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http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ory-19665.html

regards
Mech

Anyone else get the email from "Aptera" saying one of the co-founders has started "Epic EV" and "will begin production in Louisiana"? Will it be Epic fail or Epic?

I think it has more of a chance in Louisiana. Cheaper cost of living and a lot less government restrictions and regulations.

Presuming it's California's fault that Aptera diddled around with everything but building product, you could be right.

That would be Chris Anthony, and he has a decent chance of producing vehicles.

Aptera failed because the CEO they hired has crashed the company -- Aptera is the third one in a row.

I thought it was pretty funny that they kept doing stupid things with their prototypes and basically got tons of free "engineering" from forums by posters trying to set them straight!

Took me a while to find this:

EPIC EV Announces Agreement to Produce Advanced Lightweight
DeLorean Taking Us 'Back to the Future' With New Electric Car
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/4204/delorean1x.jpg

I think it's pretty funny that you would believe that any serious engineering company would believe what people say on an internet forum about engineering!!

-soD

That's just it- they weren't serious!

Unfortunately they ran out of money to be an engineering company, and time to become a car company.

just my 2 bits.

I think Aptera's mistake / cause of failure ... was the drastic change in production strategy.

Long ago , they had a small factory setup , tooled , etc ... the original concept was to produce small scale to start ... then later expand to a larger facility ... the small factory they had setup even had already begun to run and had produced a few of the first vehicles ... then new management had the bright idea to scrap the first factory and try to scale up to full size with the first product ... knowing they didn't have the capital or resources to be able to actually fund it ... they put all of their hopes on the idea that a government loan could cover the difference ... knowing full well the government loan required them to not need the loan ... which they did ... so they bluffed ... the bluff started to fall apart it was only a matter of time.

They bit off too much too fast... I think they should have just stuck to the original plan of starting off small scale production with the first factory that was already setup, tooled, and producing vehicles... sell them to the people who were on their waiting list.

IamIan -

That sounds like a pretty good synopsis. They should have delivered their first batch to the early adopters, aka "true believers". I think these folks would have been friendly towards working out the bugs *together*. Real world experience would have put Aptera on the map and been ready for Phase II.

Question: What was the stability problem that caused them to re-do the drivetrain. I am not talking about the opening door problem at X-Prize. Was the stability problem present in the Aptera *before* the new CEO took over and forced a complete redesign of the Aptera?!?!?! From my limited-info POV that sounds like the only issue that could have plagued the original design.

CarloSW2

Sorry so long winded :rolleyes:

Thanks,
In my mind , not just the first batch ... but they should have just produced and improved out of the first small scale factory for at least the first few years of vehicle deliveries ... It was already tooled up and and had started producing Apteras ... Aptera is a niche vehicle ... niche about as big as Lamborghini or smaller ... Lamborghini took about 40 years to reach a yearly production capacity of about 3,000 vehicles... if it turned out Aptera had a large enough demand with a large enough back log of orders ... than consider scale up options... until the the demand warrants it ... a few hundred a year for a brand new car company was a good place to start ... spending money to dismantle the functional factory to gamble it all on such a long short of mass production was stupid risky ... at least that's they way it seemed to me anyway.

I'm not 100% certain which specific thing you are referring to ... But as I recall ...

The original production intent was rear motor & rear wheel drive ... new management insisted on a complete redesign of internal mechanics and weight distribution for front wheel drive ... The engineers were not satisfied with the first / initial front wheel re-design ... which then latter resulted in some other adjustments to a wider 2 front wheels , etc ... were you referring / thinking about something different about stability?

If it was this sequence of events you were thinking of ... I think it's a mixed bag ...

In a BEV where you can place the mass of the batteries anywhere you like , including low to the ground ... in a 3 wheel design the vehicle has a different center of mass geometry ... usually favoring a more forward location of significant vehicle mass ... but as a BEV the batteries can still redistribute the center of mass considerably because of the amount of battery mass ... the 20kwh A123 battery pack they said they where using ( due to energy density of A123s best batteries ) the cells alone to make the pack would weigh at least 330 pounds + connections + Enclosure + thermal Management , etc ... safe to assume at least a minimum of 400 pounds of the vehicles total 1,800 pounds was batteries ... which is over 20% of the total vehicle weight that has a great deal of location versatility... but it is a greater amount of mass and % of vehicle mass than the electric motor was ... which by forcing front wheel drive displaced the batteries from the most forward position and required the greatest component of vehicle weight to be redistributed away from it's ideal center of gravity location... which it seemed the Aptera design team dealt with the less than ideal situation by spreading the front wheel base wider than original production intent... which is a perfectly valid method of adding additional stability, with or without ideal center of gravity.

Seems to me Aptera was making too many rookie mistakes to be taken seriously as an "engineering" company. On trikes the heavy end needs to be the same end as the one with two wheels, dah.

Track width widening is only a band-aid at best for poor longitudinal CG placement; it does nothing to xfer tire load from back to front. Also I saw no apparent reason to jack it up in the air like a lifted mud truck as both vertical CG and suspension arm angles suffered because of that.

How high is that driver's seat vs. the one in your car? I just measured three cars and the lowest part of the seat is about 15" in all of them vs. from this pic, knowing grocery bags are 17" tall, Aptera's could be 24" up.

http://images.thetruthaboutcars.com/...brid-car-6.jpg

How do those A-arm angles compare to the ones in your car? Not gonna slide under my car to get a pic, but for good handling the lower arm will be about horizontal, if not lower on the inner pivots than outer. Imagine pushing horizontally against a lever hinged at both ends. If the end you are pushing on is lower than the end being pushed, your end will want to go down and the other up. Now read about "jacking" if you aren't familiar with it.

http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/aptera-1.jpg

Don't be too in awe of what Aptera did for the body; that was directly lifted from Morelli's work:

http://sites.google.com/site/cirospi...PDRDesign2.jpg

So, somebody was sitting around over beers and decided to adapt the lowest drag body form possible for street use. Great idea, if only they'd picked a development team with some experience.

Sell the first batch, get some cashflow to improve the design and sell more of that. Then repeat the process.

www.loremo.com made the same mistake of not selling their first design despite a line-up of buyers (including me).

Or else do like Mr. Fry- GET IT BUILT (at least for the most part) prior to starting a hype-fest. Well-developed prototype work done first = easier transition to production + people's expectations can be met or exceeded. Unless, of course, your true goal was to grab some investor development millions and run. That's far less work.

So what has happened to the vehicles that were actually built ?
I saw that the frames and such had been destroyed, but what about the cars that were already built ?
Is this another EV-1 story ? Were the cars crushed ?

As I recall ... they were originally ( Accelerated Composites ) ... a rookie composites company ... so at best they were a rookie composites company taking a shot at changing into a rookie car company.

I personally would have considered taking them seriously if they had stuck to the original small scale production factory that was already setup and producing vehicles.

It still was ... just not as much as it was before the front wheel drive change from the new management.

Band-Aid , agreed.

However ... sense the question was about stability , CG is only one component of stability ... band-aid or not , the wider front two wheels is a valid method to improve stability.

Agreed.

Not in Awe at all ... it has nice aerodynamics ... better than my car currently does ... better , than many other vehicles... but not the best ... and still has room for improvement.

- - - - - - -

Separate from bad management choices...

The largest area of disappointment for me in the design was in the final weight for a 3 wheeled carbon fiber 2 person car ... 1,800 pounds... I mean come on ... My 3rd party crash tested Aluminum Body Insight is 1,847 ... 47 Lbs ??? that's it?

It did not help them at the X Prize did it.

It is not enough for there to be a simple weight bias towards the two-wheel end on a trike. If you don't want oversteer on a tadpole- and you probably don't- you need to look at the load on each tire. When you do that, you can see that you can have more weight "on the front" yet still have more weight on that singular rear contact patch if the weight isn't biased forward ENOUGH.

And now VW is on course to disappoint by pricing the XL1 at $50,000 or so.

I figured they'd be high, but not that high. It's time for Ford or someone to step up with their clone of it.

?????????????

Well actually it did help.
It did improve stability.
Stability was part of the competition.

Help yes ... compensate for all other Aptera deficiencies compared to all other x-prize competitors in all other parts of the competition , no.

Perhaps.

'ENOUGH' depends on the context / conditions , and criteria of what is 'ENOUGH'.

I'm not them so I can't know for certainty ... but perhaps that is why it was originally designed to have the comparatively lighter motor in the rear as a rear wheel drive to keep the comparatively heavier battery component in the more forward position... but the new company management wanted it done differently ... good or bad , they pulled rank , and ordered the redesign.

Of course 2 tire front wheel drive pulls out / handles significantly differently than a one rear wheel drive pushes / handles ... which is another reason I think the choice to change has pros and cons.

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...er/3wheel2.jpg

Let's say I pull one back wheel off a Metro to make a trike like this one. Let's say the empty car had 60% weight on the front axle and 40% on the rear, stock. Let's say it weighs 2000 lbs; there is 1200 lbs on the front axle and 800 on the rear. Definitely a huge forward weight bias right? As a four-wheeler each front tire has 600 lbs on it and each rear tire has 400. When we remove one back wheel, the remaining back wheel now has 800 lbs on it- MUCH more than each front at 600 lbs even though it "still has more weight on the front"! When the rear contact patch(es) are more heavily loaded than the front(s), it is easy to get oversteer.

Oversteer isn't automatically a bad thing- I have several rear-heavy cars. But it can get drivers who are accustomed to understeer in trouble.

Without getting too far into the dynamics of handling by now getting into accelerating and decelerating in corners, as far as steady state corning, fwd or rwd shouldn't matter.

Actually I think fwd would have been the way to go on a consumer Aptera, but it has to be done right.

Frank -- is that picture titled: "And That's The SPARE Tire!"

YES!!! If you're Smokey Stover! :eek:

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...romo-cover.jpg

Speaking of plag... I mean, sources of inspiration, I think I see where Dr. Suess got inspired...

In general, I agree with many of the points that have been made; in particular the need to start small and improve and adjust as they went, and that the new management bunged it up royally. They wanted to go big -- like 10K units in a year, and that was not really doable.

But some of the details are not quite correct: the front wheel drive was a decision by the original management, and there were very good reasons for this. They strayed big time by insisting on full roll down side windows (instead of partial openings). This necessitated a complete reworking of the doors, and the chassis, and the weight was increased, which then required a bigger battery pack, which then moved some of the cells to the rear floor, which shifted the Cg -- and the original efficiency was transformed into a very average EV.

And yes, the front wheels were very wide, and the original intent was to be classified as a motorcycle.

We may yet see an Aptera 2e sold and on the road -- the IP is up for bid, and the founders will (probably) be in the hunt to buy things up. Or, at the very least they can redo based on what they have learned.

What IP? There's Morelli's body shape, which after 30+ years must be public domain by now, and everything else needs rework. :confused:

ahhhhh..... I hadn't thought about that. but, now that I have, I'm not overly worried.

In rainy or snowy conditions, it is actually entirely possible the more heavily loaded single tire will have more "traction" then dual rear tires, just like narrower tires are better then wider.

Also interesting is to look at roll centers - pretty hard to have a roll center for a single rear tire anywhere but at the ground, which makes the front roll center fairly interesting if your goal is "straight down the road with side winds and pavement grooves".

It only gets worse when you add passengers and gear, as most layouts put passenger and gear weight overwhelmingly on the rear.

Frank -

I know I've seen the Morelli shape over the ears, but I never made the *obvious* connection. I can't remember if the v1.0 Aptera website stated this or not (the v1.0 website had more information than the new-CEO version).

CarloSW2

Neil -

Were the pre-roll-up window prototypes road-tested? Did they have stability problems?

CarloSW2

Selling the high-MPG-at-some-cost-and-annoyance side of things will be bad enough, so no-one needs to design a weird looking vehicle like a 3 wheeler.

There's nothing wrong with having 4 wheels, even if it adds some drag and weight.
The rewards in stability have proven the 4-wheeled concept over and over.

I think the trike layout can have advantages for one or two passenger side-by-side vehicles, but handling deteriorates quickly when loads in addition to those in a front seat are placed near the single wheel.

No, they didn't state that connection, and strongly implied that it was their design. Within a month or two, people were pointing out the fact that it was the Morelli design. They also quoted a .06 Cd, and talked about development via CFD -- but CFD on that shape with wheels would not have produced .06. The .15 they claimed later would be closer, if they had all the details right.

Although if the vehicle is light (granted... Aptera made a stab at handling this through redesign -- they just made the thing 3 times as heavy as first announced) then the side-by-side seating makes it handle like a motorcycle with a side car, with different right turn and left turn dynamics when one person is on board. The Aptera was so fat, that the driver was fairly close to the line between the left front and rear contact patches. Combine that with high CG and incorrect geometry, and you can expect poor handling.

Stiff suspension and low CG can help with this stuff.

I know they wanted to stay out of ground effect and that's why it's so jacked up, but the Morelli shape was tested without wheels or anything between it and the ground plane. Simply adding wheels and their fairings and the struts must have had an effect on the flow all along the bottom and even lower sides of the body, such that I wonder if the ground effect aero was so disturbed by those things, that they could have just lowered it to a height suitable for handling anyway without incurring any further noticeable aero penalty.

I know they stiffened the bejeezus out of the springs at the X Prize competition in order to pass the slalom test. I wonder what the ride quality was with those springs? Even with that extreme front track width and stiff springs, those arm angles and CG look like deal killers to me.

The lowest Cd number I've seen associated with Aptera is 0.11. The front wheel drive versions had 0.15.

The pre SO-1 versions did not have stability problems, or at least the PP range of prototypes did not. The Zen model with rear wheel drive was quite a bit taller, so it may not have been as stable.

The PP-6 or so was the best of the bunch:http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....e-02-13-09.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...eInSunrise.jpg

Goin' with the Flow: Aptera 2e - Gallery

Actually, there is no intrinsic benefit to three wheelers for drag reduction. If you make the three-wheeler fat, (Aptera style) there is no benefit at all. You have to at least put the people on centerline, (or near, as in Doug's idea) to dramatically reduce frontal area.

Despite Aptera's claims to the contrary, three wheels do not have less rolling resistance than 4. Rolling resistance is a function of weight and Crr. Three wheels with 333 lb on each have the same rolling resistance as 4 wheels with 250 on each.

There is a slight advantage in parts count to three-wheelers.

The real disadvantage to four wheels is that you are then a car, and are playing in a market where a $billion to develop a single new model is standard, and Aptera's 24 million in funding is a rounding error. You can expect to spend millions in crash testing.

Three-legged stools are more stable than four-legged stools. Camera tripods are tripods for good reasons. It's just a matter of engineering a three-wheeler to work right, as Morgan did in the 1930s. The T-rex out-handles a Porsche. Jay Leno raved about the modern Morgan Three Wheeler.

I remember way back when I first saw VW Rabbits and Mini's racing. They were all 3-wheelers in the turns.

http://www.red4est.com/lrc/racer_html/racecars.html
http://www.red4est.com/lrc/racer_html/rabbit1a.jpg

Swiftune at Goodwood
http://www.swiftune.com/themes/swift...rys-Trophy.gif