Where will they be staged for shipping?

[paul-kirchner]

I thought the exact same thing. And where will the customer pick up experience be held?

[Biker]

The Aptera parking lot itself probably has less than a days’ worth of production space but there’s this seemingly empty lot sorta across the street:

[OZ.]

I offered my driveway and yard, but haven’t heard back yet…

[paul-schultz]

😆

[george-hughes]

This is another way Aptera is really different … from the get go it will likely build each vehicle for each individual buyer. Unlike the demands of steel bodied construction where the goal is to maximize the production of each part – you’ve got to if you’re going to use a tiny part on 10 models representing a production of 2 million parts. Your goal is to maximize the speed of production to gain efficiency of scale.

Aptera’s production philosophy is to build a container load of suspensions, batteries – each of the major sub-assemblies – and send one or two containers to the assembly facility where the parts wait in the container until the built begins.

And that build takes two-hours to complete, we’re told.

You know the last time I bought a car from a ‘dealer’ the rigmarole took over two hours.

With this knowledge, I’m going to make a bold prediction.

By 2026, there will be at least ten final assembly plants for Aptera but that is not the prediction.

Rather the bold statement is that after a person places their order, they will be notified of when the build will occur and will be able to view its assembly from a live video feed that is streamed. They will have the option of having it personalized (including titles in the video that follows the car through the factory that is downloaded to the Aptera’s memory for ‘posterity.’)

The new owner could even time their arrival at the assembly plant to pick it up when it comes off the line.

This approach emphasizes the personalized, hand-made qualities that make the Aptera really, really special while taking advantage of the profits possible from extreme JIT manufacturing all the while maximizing brand satisfaction with the high touch involvement possible through high-tech.

Did I mention my bold prediction also includes the assembly plant is part of a retail EV parts and service center that purports to service all EVs and even add hybrid power to your classic F-150 with a single in-wheel motor and a 10 kwh battery that will improve fuel economy by 50 percent.

It is also a battery recycling center, used EV dealer and sells E-cycles and FUV’s in something kind of like Fully Charged’s show, except you can buy an Aptera and drive out with your finished one in just over 2-hours that you spent in the coffee shop that is also attached to your bank of DC fast chargers. All this is located in a re-purposed retail mall.

Relating this to the topic:

If you’re producing to meet demand for specific orders, then you don’t need a 100 acres on which to park your completed vehicles.

That you will eventually be able to walk into a retail assembly plant with a wad of cash and drive out with a custom produced vehicle two-hours later means your production has saved you the cost of that 100 acres of ‘space.’ If you’re building vehicles in massive mega-plant located far away from most of your customers, you have to have the parking lot.

If you’re trucking seven to fourteen shipping containers containing tightly packed sub-assemblies in a dispersed assembly location, you are minimizing the environmental impact of your production by decreasing shipping, transportation and storage costs. Because you’re storing the sub-assemblies in highly rational packing arrangement, those seven-ten containers would ideally hold enough components to construct 80-100 complete Aptera.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by  George Hughes. Reason: add final observation

[fanfare-100]

George Hughes, I love your imagination. And I don;t mean that in a snide or sarcastic way. This is what dreams are made of. And often the realities that we form begin with a dream, a vision and from there a mission and then the mission plan and from that the course of action and then the actual tasking and work and then the product or result. JIT, if done right can allow for the decentralisation of manufacturing as well as the geographic distribution and elimination of single points of failure as well. Each facility would be placed where there is most regional and then local area demand.

[george-hughes]

Thank you for the validation. Whether or not it will be influential is highly problematic.

Still, I see what I see, influenced by my smaller market orientation. I like the idea of dispersed money and power as an element of politics and that suggests a greater degree of local ownership and economic engagement. My experience tells me that is more conducive to small ‘d’ democracy, which along with the climate, the grid, etc. are all worth saving.

Still, Aptera is a special case, not just because of it’s revolutionary design. The small assembly plants are an absolute inspiration.

There are many reasons I want Aptera to deliver 10 million or more Aptera by 2030. I recognize that Aptera is in no position to capitalize that large a venture. Honestly, that happening is highly problematic … unless you take a broader view of the ‘revolution’ in the way the vehicle is assembled.

Look at the assembly process video. The way Chris explains it, the first step is to attach the front suspension assembly followed by the rear suspension assembly to the structural battery pack.

The first obvious thing is that if you can attach two wheels to the front suspension assembly, you can attach a similar two-wheel assembly to the rear instead of the single wheel. You could either reverse the front structure or even adopt the trailing arm rear for both sides. In the latter scenario.

Basically, you could modify the attachments on the same battery pack as Aptera. The modification of the pack would likely be minimal and with a little engineering, it might be an interchangeable subsystem. The control, charging, dash, user interface, solar cells would be interchangeable subsystems.

What would be different is the composite monocoque tub.

To me, this means that if Aptera corporate were to concentrate for its growth on sub-assembly manufacture (motors, suspensions, batteries, computer controllers, interiors, tubs … all the components) they may find assembly would come from partnerships with local entities, some of which adopt the retail center vision above.

The advantage to Aptera would be concentrating its first efforts exactly how they are doing now. The only difference is that additional investment would be focused on sub-assembly manufacture.

The idea is that entrepreneurial entities in various markets now have a great opportunity to engage locally, with local jobs and, because they are production partners would have an interest in promoting the brand and solution. The most fantastic news is the assembly design of Aptera is based on Monro’s plant designs which are ‘engineered’ to be profitable at low production levels (Breakeven is about 1500 vehicles.) but would be very profitable up to a capacity of something like 15000-20000 vehicles.

How this is structured business-wise is a big question. Certainly, the production could be by contract from Aptera which provides the components to an ‘independent’ assembly site. This is like those EV companies that hire Chinese plants to construct the vehicle they presumably designed and marketed.

But what if, instead of contract assemblers, Aptera made the leap to franchise assemblers that were hyped to do the bigger vision.

These independent franchises could use Aptera parts and sub-assemblies to construct the Aptera, whatever 4-wheel variants (light duty delivery or five seat sedan Aptera offers). If the demand for official Aptera branded vehicles is lower than the assembly capacity for the plant, they may assembly other vehicles from other companies using Aptera subsystems and/or similar parts manufactured by other suppliers. Depending on the facility, these new EV oriented assembly/service centers may also provide repair services for other brands and even, as suggested above, salvage or recycle parts/batteries/etc.

Being the EV experts in the communities these franchisees serve, they may also find profit in niches like hybridizing ICE vehicles or even doing full EV conversions. Depending on the rules of the franchise, these service centers could also market their repair/warranty services to other EV brands.

This may be a workaround for dealership laws in some states or maybe useful in marketing with a direct sale model. After all, at present all sales are by reservation only.

These latter operations/potentials of profit which are mentioned because they lower the risk of the venture for the local investors. IMO, even the announcement of this kind of rapid deployment of assembly plants through franchising would be an impetus to a bunch of capable midwest manufacturers that are wondering about their future as an automotive supplier.

If Aptera is the principle owner of these assembly plants/retail outlets, BTW, the cooperation that could emerge (to the benefit of all, BTW) simply won’t happen.

Monro’s lean production design is, as I’ve suggested, quite adaptable. It provides real jobs in a pleasant production environment that can be ‘installed’ in a variety of existing buildings without destroying the existing building for other uses.

The greater benefit, though, is the proliferation of these assembly plants to ‘markets that want them enough to buy a franchise’ would have a great example for computer-aided assembly.

The imperative is that the steel-bodied car is obsolete because it just weighs too damn much. The answer is in strong, lightweight, composite monocoque coupled with the zero-loss in-wheel motors that attach to the battery to create a ‘skate board’.

How we figure out how to come together to produce 10,000,000 by 2030 is critical. Otherwise, instead of products built like Aptera (light, efficient, aerodynamic and solar powered) we will be drowned in nice, steel bodied bricks that are designed to rust into oblivion in 20 years. And that is the best case scenario.

[Lane-Costilow]

👍

[paul-carlucci]

They’re going to do whatever business model maximizes the productivity of the factory and that means deep order queues. Almost every Aptera is likely to be made to order and I would expect them to not really keep much in the way of built inventory outside of cancellations.

Building each one to spec on demand means staffing for peak load but having slack time, and that’s not really going to happen. They’ll staff shifts to meet demand while working as close as possible to max output for that given headcount.