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Posted on 12/05/2011 7:42:35 AM PST by Abathar
Electric car maker Aptera Motors is closing after failing to woo enough investors to bring a new sedan to market.
Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur said the Carlsbad, Calif.-based company closed its doors Friday and laid off all 30 of its employees.
The company was hoping to get a $150 million loan from the Department of Energy but needed to raise matching funds, Wilbur said. He said Aptera had trouble drumming up interest from investors, who have been spooked by the difficulties other small electric car makers have had. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla Motors Inc., for example, has racked up millions of dollars in losses as it prepares to bring its electric Model S sedan to market in mid-2012.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
No one seems to discuss the litigation from personal injury and wrongful death these cars will generate. Put this thing against a non-ecofriendly MAC truck and you’ll have no survivors in these electric cars.
Yeah, it does look like a sperm cell with landing gear.
My second impression was "Who ya gonna call?..."
The founder simply didn’t grease enough Dem palms with campaign contributions. Otherwise he would have landed the $150M easy as pie.
It better come with a trailer hitch because it won’t hold Mom, Junior, Junior’s 6 baseball buddies, their baseball equipment, a cooler, a tray of homemade cookies, Lil Missy and her bff, and Rover inside that thing.
Electric cars are a tyrant’s dream....Limited range, and all he has to do is flip a switch to turn off the grid and any revolt is over because folks can’t move.
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To bee or not to bee, that is the question...........................
Our family owns a Yukon 2 dr 4X4, a Yukon 4 dr 4x4 and my Suburban 4x4. We simply grab which vehicle that will suit our needs at the time and it works out great. Like my machine tools here at work, you can always do a small job on a big machine, but not vice-verse.
And yes, all of them have a Reese Hitch that gets well used also.
I guess it is only Government that invests in the PAST. Maybe the race to the 18th century is slowing down??
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aptera_(genus)&action=edit&redlink=1
Aptera (genus), a genus of cockroaches..................
Even in the UK, a country that has drunk a lot more of the green kool aid than we have, the guys from Top Gear could not find any places to plug one in for a recharge.
I met Bucky and spoke with him a few times. I suppose DaVinci was thought of as a nutjob too, as I’ve always thought of Fuller as the unappreciated Leonardo of our age.
His low-cost, icosahedral designs - one frequency geodesics - could actually be ‘flown in’ to relieve suffering in disaster areas. They WERE flown to the arctic and formed the ‘DEW Line’.
I like your other description: “a walking unorthodoxy”, very apt for him. He invested his own personal fortune in the Dymaxion car...this was in 1933!
I admired him greatly.
I love that show! Got hooked a couple of months ago and now try to catch it instead of watching Shepard Smith get his panties in a twist over something or other.
considering they don’t make any new ones, (not the lame wussified us version but the UK version with the three egomaniacs) [though i must confess their trips to the usa and insults do not sit well for the ongoing ugly european stereotype] I is a decent car show. particularly when they rip a car to reveiwer shreads.
I about fell over when I saw that he was doing a Honda add some time ago. No way would I want him endorsing any product.
I've read about him, his life and ideas and to me he is one of those inventors that embodied inventing. Everyone dreams, only a rare few risk it all to take the next steps.
I guess it'll live on in 2009's "Star Trek" film where it made an appearance at Star Fleet Academy.
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