Word: carred
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...size of Toyota or GM. Says Bill Green, a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm that has invested in Tesla Motors: "No one argues today that the Tesla will serve anything but a small subset of the market. But it has changed the conversation. The big car companies will look at Tesla and say, 'Hey, maybe I can use that technology in my cars...
VantagePoint as well as other top venture-capital firms are betting big on just that. What has these investors excited is that the rules of the auto industry are changing. Radical new car designs using lightweight materials and utilizing new-style power plants are becoming more affordable. Technology--computer-controlled battery packs, with power-storage systems that use nanotechnology--may soon become cheap enough to allow upstarts to compete with the Big Three...
...understand this new paradigm, I met with Steve Fambro, the founder of Aptera, the start-up that is building both a battery-powered and a plug-in hybrid lightweight commuter car. The moment of inspiration came in June 2004: the launch of SpaceShipOne. The SpaceShipOne team had access to high-tech tools that enabled the building and design of a rocket for only $25 million--cheap by NASA standards. Could the same tools be applied to the auto industry? "The way cars are designed, half the energy they need is just to push the air out of the way," Fambro...
...result? The Aptera's drag will be a third of an average car's and less than half of the Prius', which now has the lowest drag in the industry. Cheap technology allowed Fambro to create such an aerodynamic design on a limited budget. For $50,000 Fambro found some off-the-shelf software--the same kind NASA uses to test the drag of its space vehicles. To keep drag as low as possible, for example, the three-wheeled car has no side-view mirrors--the driver has 180° rear visibility with the help of rear-mounted cameras. He estimates...
Even if Fambro succeeds, the impact on the market will be minimal. He hopes to sell 3,000 to 4,000 cars the first year; GM alone produces about 300,000 cars a month. Perhaps the Aptera will be used as part of a light-rail system where the commuter will hop into a small car waiting at the train station. Or perhaps the Aptera will serve as a model for cars of the future: lightweight, great gas mileage, and loaded with computer controls...