Something I find incredibly weird about US company culture is how they talk about overtime like it’s a good thing.
“Our employees worked weekends, days and nights to make this happen! We wouldn’t have succeeded without people who are willing to give up their personal lives!”
I hope they not only succeed but get shares. Doing weekends or nights for a company you don’t (partially) own feels like a con.
Find people who care about what they’re working on and they’ll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won’t be around if they don’t succeed. I’m sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive “startups” that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:
(I’m sure many others)
Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn’t make it:
- Sono Motors’ Sion: Compact EV with solar panels, power sharing, intended to be easily repairable and included a detail manual. They had prototypes but never went to production. Now the company does niche solar applications.
- Workhorse: Series Hybrid (think Chevy Volt) Pickup truck with onboard power for tools etc (was announced around or even before Rivian). Was a very pragmatic idea IMO. Later sort-of resold to Lordstown. Now company does some other things, like drones.
- Lordstown Motors’ Endurance: EV Pickup Truck with hub motors. Made a few hundred, but they have been dragging it out long enough for Ford to make electric pickups. And the idea wasn’t too original even when it was announced.
I was thinking about the US lately. Can’t remember why exactly maybe some friends popped up on my Facebook.
But I decided it actually wouldn’t be that bad of a place to live. If it wasn’t for the toxic work culture.
If they worked normal hours and had 20+ holidays it would be alright. Other shit annoy me and you would have to make sure you live in the nice areas but I could live there and enjoy it. But the work culture is an absolute no go. Wish they were like the Aussie. Show up do hard day of work fuck off for some beers. If the surfs good call in sick and end up seeing your boss in the line up. Work hard for a few months then decide fuck it and go to Bali for a weekend accidentally stay there for two months then decide you need to go back to work because travelling is too much effort walk into a job 1 week after landing home.
There’s something that people really fail to grasp with solar, and that’s the fact there is bugger all energy in the sun, and you need a huge surface area to get any meaningful energy.
A home solar array often takes up a significant chunk of the roof area, and the amount of surface area a car typically has means that even perfectly efficient solar panels wouldn’t collect enough energy to significantly contribute to the vehicle’s range.
There’s a good reason why vehicle manufacturers don’t bother adding them.
Yes, but with a light and efficient vehicle, along with enough area covered in solar, it should be able to get you about 15 miles of free travel when left out on a sunny day. It has a battery. It isn’t just running on sunshine and lollipops.
I’m not believing they’ll get even close to that in a production vehicle that’s US street legal.
Yeah, this is why it’s dumb. When is a parked car parked ideally to capture sunlight? Just put the money into solar panels on a building or in a field, charge your car when parked, and you have a much better and cheaper product. The solar panels on the building can also be used to power other things, unlike the car. It’s such a stupid idea and will be very expensive to get custom panels for the car that aren’t super fragile and also efficient. Just spend that money and larger cheap panels. This is purely to get VC funding and nothing more. It’s a waste of time and energy.
In america? Litterally everywhere. Even driving down the highway would get trickle charging.
If your expecting to fully charge from the panels, youre gonna have a bad day. But every extra mile would overcome the cost over its lifetime.
I mean, it’d be cool to get a couple miles of range here and there without having to plug in. Could make for a nice little errand vehicle in a smaller city where there aren’t trees or tall buildings to block light and you just park in a driveway or apartment parking lot. If say the battery itself would be big enough for an 80 mile range, I could see some people never having to plug this car in.
It’ll come down to price, of course. If it’s cheap, it could be cool and useful. If it’s expensive, it’s a novelty and would have no practical reasoning to be purchased.
15 miles a day under ideal conditions isn’t really a significant amount, most EVs could run for multiple weeks without being charged under those conditions.
That’s 100 free miles a week. Sure, most people will need to charge it anyway, but that’s still 100 free miles a week.
But I don’t think it’s a good idea. It would be more efficient to just put the same solar panels in your roof, where they don’t contribute to the car’s weight, don’t force your to park in sunlight instead of indoor parking or garage, and whose output can be used for charging the car OR for anything else as needed.
Their tech isn’t just the solar, they’ve optimized the car solely for efficiency. They claim their car can get 10 mi/kwh, so with 700W of solar panels they can get up to 40 miles of charge per day with just the solar. By contrast, the solar panels that are available on the new Prius get 4 miles of charge per day.
Now that their production-intent vehicles are just starting to be built up, I’m eagerly awaiting their actual test data that hopefully verifies their claims on efficiency, range, crash safety, etc. but we’ll see 🤞 I really hope they succeed.
Solar panels are also added weight, which reduces range. Any way you look at it, it makes more sense to have the solar panels at a base location you go back to.
I guess an RV, or a camp trailer, makes sense to have panels on it, but that’s about it
There’s also things like Sentinel mode on Teslas that use power.
My main gripe is people think a solar car will never need to be charged, or only on trips, and that’s just not the case.
Solar panels are incredibly thin and light. There is no reason not to include them.
There is good amount of energy in the sunshine. The output of solar arrays struggle to make big power out of small surface areas because we haven’t figured out how to get more than 20% of the power that hits the panel. If they do get 20% or more, it’s been with very expensive and fragile panels.
Been following this company’s development for over a decade now. I really want them to succeed but I have major doubts.
It’s good to see that Aptera is still a possibility!
I want them to succeed. I really hope they do.
