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107 comments on Friday open thread

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RickD on January 20, 2006 - 10:53am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Happy news?

http://www.acceleratedcomposites.com/p_aptera.html

The Aptera - 330MPG diesel/hybrid car.
Cost less than $ 20,000.
0 to 60 mph in 11 seconds.

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ericy on January 20, 2006 - 11:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Yeah, this one has been making the rounds over the past couple of days.

On the surface it looks kind of cool.

The downside is that they haven't even built a prototype yet.   For that matter, the design itself isn't even complete.   The company doing this says they have made breakthroughs in building things out of composite, but as best I can tell they don't have any automotive experience.  They are still looking for 'angel investors' to help pay for the prototype.

They plan to use off-the-shelf components (so they won't be building engines themselves), and I am sure there are many other parts they can just buy as well.

I guess my point though is that there may be subleties to things like getting the suspension and steering working so that it feels right, and these are things that they probably won't be able to buy.

It is classified as a motorcycle - this helps evade much of the crash safety testing requirements.  

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geewiz on January 20, 2006 - 9:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Interesting to see how it holds up to a Stepford wife in a chevy suburban or a F-350 4x4 crew cab dually!
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Stuart Staniford on January 20, 2006 - 12:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
They have no investment, and no experienced business people listed as executives on the web site.  Hence they are at an extremely early stage - much too early to be issuing press releases - they clearly don't know how to raise money.  Not very credible at this point.
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ericy on January 20, 2006 - 2:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Perhaps - I wonder if the point of the press release was to help raise funds.  I gather that the venture capital people are all eager to fund alternative energy types of things right now.

They aren't the only people thinking along these lines, however.  Volkswagen had a similar project - they had a turbodiesel two-seater with a carbon fiber body.  Theirs was only rated for ~260 mpg, and this was something that they did build and field test.  They didn't have any hybrid technology in there though.

They called it the '1-liter' car, meaning it would burn one liter of fuel to go 100 km.  They did unfortunately abandon the project:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/vw_abandons_its.html

The problem for VW was the cost:

But Volkswagen now says that it could not produce an ultra-economical car for less than €20,000 ($25,900)--too expensive for its target market.

I gather that the carbon fiber was the deal-killer here.  You need it to make the vehicle lightweight, but the stuff is expensive.

Now if this company (Accelerated Composites) has come up with a way to reduce the cost of making carbon fiber components, there could be value here if they were to simply license the technology to someone like VW who has sufficient experience to make an entire car.

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GreyZone on January 20, 2006 - 3:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That may be part of the venture capital play - get your name up in lights now, while the demand for fuel efficient cars is rising, and cause a big player to buy you out. This is common enough in other industries so I don't see why such a play could not be expected in the auto industry as well.
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Stuart Staniford on January 20, 2006 - 6:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A press release is not how you raise venture capital.
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sfambro on January 21, 2006 - 10:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I apologize for the poor quality of the website, and the limited renderings. It will improve as resources permit. In the interim, the bio of the team members is available in .pdf format. http://www.acceleratedcomposites.com/team_bio.pdf

 Judging by the lack of content on the website, it's understandable that our project doesn't seem further along than it is.  Lots more photos, photos of our destructive composites testing, our white papers, simulations (CFD, FEA, et al), status of our patent applications, and more recent pictures of the prototype will be posted as time permits.

Thanks for all of the input.

Steve
AC

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