Origin of the Aptera Shape

[Joshua Rosen]

<div>There is an Aptera owners club video which shows the origin of Aptera’s shape. The Morelli shape goes back to the 1970s, it’s very very close to Aptera.</div><div>

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[Francis Giroux]

What really makes the Morelli Shape car extremely low drag coefficient is the narrow tires (about 2″ wide. This car approaches the drag of a vellomobile.

[Bob Kirchner]

Kinda makes me wish Aptera had opted for a tire section narrower than 195. But availability is the issue until the buying public gets over its belief that wider tires=better.

[Lord Chad Dunham]

While it doesn’t quite have the right shape, I remember hearing about Loremo (LOw REsistance MObility). I would have bought this car if it would have gone into (mass) production.

https://www.hotcars.com/loremo-ls-concept-car-/

[Francis Giroux]

Tires on my Honda Insight 1st generation (same weight as Aptera) are only five inches wide. Aptera’s are eight inches wide. I may do some experiments with some 16 inch or 17″ rims with spare tires (skinny and short). I have found numerous spare tires with rims on EBAY that are 16″ and 17″. If they fit my Aptera when it ever gets here, I will do some efficiency experiments to try to set some records. I expect at 30 mph or less I can achieve 50 watt hours per mile or less. On Summer Solstice in upstate New York (16 hours of sun) I’ll attempt 100 miles on solar alone. Well really it’ll be on batteries in early morning or late evening, using only the miles of charge I accumulate in one full day.

[V Pilot]

I’m in Schenectady, where are you?

[V Pilot]

Hey Francis, so we are close! You certainly have some impressive accomplishments. My on line ID is not what you think. I prefer to keep my feet planted on terra firma, though I don’t mind flying one bit. I am a motorcycle guy. My preferred steeds are Italian V-twins, of which I have many. Oh, and THANK YOU for your service. That F4 was a bad ass plane in it’s day. I remember watching the Blue Angels fly them when I was a kid…awesome

• This reply was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by  V Pilot.

[Francis Giroux]

I live just North of Hudson Falls, but I have property from Corinth to Northumberland (Gansevoort) to Kingsbury to New Mexico and Arizona. This yellow encapsulated recumbent trike you see in my profile photo and two other recumbent trikes have been from Canada to Schenectady through Vermont and New York,to Massachusetts and to Washington DC, over 45,000 miles in the last ten years. The yellow machine is even more efficient than the Aptera (100 watt hours will bring me 20 miles). That’s 2-3 times the efficiency as a bicycle, but I refuse to electrify it because my legs still work. I am 71 years old but still consider myself an athlete.

[Francis Giroux]

By the way, what is a V pilot? I was also an Air Force F-4 Phantom fighter bomber pilot and top gun. The reason I ride the trikes instead of running cross country (my favorite sport) is because of an experimental airplane crash in 2003 that almost killed me. My feet are still broken along with many other maladies from the crash. I have built and flown four planes including the ones I crashed. Two were ultralights in which I competed and set records.

[Francis Giroux]

My motorcycle days were during college. Got hurt there too, just a bad scrape from flying over the handlebars when I applied the brakes on my brother’s Honda after being used to my Honda that needed lots of pressure to brake. I was on a dirt road and the front brake locked up and over the bars I went, scraping a big hole through the skin on my left elbow, filling it with gravel. I did the same thing on a bicycle down a gravel road hill a few year before the motorcycle accident, same spot on the elbow. My email address is hydrogenboost@roadrunner.com if you want to talk.