The Skinny on Aptera: Top Aptera Execs Chat With EVCast
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Bo: Hello, this is Bo Bennett from the EVCast.
Ryan: Hi, this is Ryan Levesque from EVCast.
Marques: Hey, guys, how are you doing?
Bo: Good, doing fine.
Ryan: Pretty good, Marques.
Bo: Good, doing fine! Great, excited to talk to you. Okay, this is the first time we ever did on our show, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard our show or are familiar with it, it’s the first time we actually went out to our listeners and asked them to submit a bunch of questions, and we have a lot of people who are big Aptera fans out there, and they have a lot of questions for you. We sifted through them, and we hope to ask you the best questions that we can. You ready?
Marques: (inaudible)
Bo: Great! The first.. I guess the… let’s start with the big news about Aptera recently was the delay in actually getting it to market or launching your first car. Can you tell me a little bit about that, why did you guys choose to push it back?
Marques: Sure. Um, we’d been marching along to a December 2008 launch time, but as we started digging into the vehicle at greater depth. From a number of standpoints, for one, we’ve been doing a lot of process trials, going through the way that we build the vehicle, how we make sure that every vehicle, that the first vehicle that comes off the line is going to be as good as the hundred-and-first and the one-thousand-and-first, and we found a lot of things in our manufacturing process that we felt like we needed some room for improvement — you know, the build is not exactly as repeatable as we needed it to be, so it was difficult for us to ensure that the first vehicle was going to get the same level of quality that the last, and in this marketplace, that’s not acceptable. We have to make sure that every consumer is going to be delighted with the vehicle from the moment that they pick it up whether they got the first one or the one-thousand-and-first one.
Bo: Sure.
Marques: The second piece was that we’ve been doing a lot of research. We’ve got about 60,000 people right now who follow us actively on the newsletter, and we went out to those folks and to those who have deposits, and asked them to give us some feedback on what they think the things are that we’re doing well, what do they think their expectations of the vehicle, and what we found is that the expectations on the part of our consumers are very very high. And so we added to that another set of research with additional people who we thought were potential buyers, and they gave us some more detailed feedback, and we’ve just been putting it all together, and what we found was that the level of expectation of what people want out of the Aptera, out of the 2e today has grown and evolved from where we had our original sights set in the beginning. In order for us to make sure that we’re delivering on the promise that we don’t have dissatisfied customers, we felt like it was time for us to slow down a little bit, go through a lot of vehicle refinements, and explore ways to improve the personal interaction with the vehicle and make it overall a better product.
Bo: Okay. That makes sense to me. How does this effect your schedule in terms of, say, getting the first vehicle out versus the fiftieth and the two-hundred-fiftieth — do you have a ramp-up schedule set at this point, or is it too early to know what that will be?
Marques: So, we do have a ramp-up schedule. What we’re doing now, though, is we’re trying to balance that ramp up schedule in terms of what we have in our mind against what the consumer’s real demand is.
Bo: Mmmhmm.
Marques: So, one of the things that we’ve asked is that some of our depositors are getting involved with us in a program that we call lock-in that helps us assess our first month of production more accurately. So, what we’re going to continue to do now is we’re going to build what we’ll call pre-production vehicles, and we’re going to hold them in a quarantine status, is probably the easiest way to explain it, where we’re going to keep it among the management team and our executives and doing evaluations for improving the vehicle between now and October, and when October comes, then we’re going to go by the public and actually start delivering vehicles. And gentlemen, I was just joined by our founder, Steve Fambro.
Bo: All right!
Ryan: Hello, Steve.
Steve: Hello.
Bo: Welcome. Thanks for joining us. So, this lock-in period — how many people do you have committed to this so far? Or, if you can’t give out the number, perhaps a percentage — just a rough idea. Because I know when it comes time to put down money, even just a deposit you can get back, maybe a lot of people are willing to do that, but when it’s firm, I’m really curious how many people would actually commit.
Marques: Well, I’d say right now we have over ten percent right now, and that’s with just about a week into the program, and the rate is going along quite steadily. I mean, people are, the people who saw the vision in Aptera early, are, they really believe in it, and they are trusting and confident with us, and they’re staying and taking it along.
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I am so excited about this car!! I am thrilled to hear they are getting closer to selling them to the public.
Nice to see the whole interview posted, thanks for your efforts.
I’m underwhelmed by Aptera’s communication (Marques the marketeer is especially patronizing: “pixiedust”, really gee, thanks).
For example: “Marques: Tell everybody that you know to call in and put down a deposit. (laughter) Aptera.com.”
Put a deposit on what exactly? Towards what final price?
I didn’t think the EVCast folks were offered much “news”. Aptera’s announcements provide little nourishment. As an early depositor I’m getting tired of their infantile approach to communication.
Love them or hate them, Tesla did a much better job of communicating with folks during their development phase and after. Aptera makes me feel like I’m in Nursery school. Oh well, guess it’s my nap time now.
“Put a deposit on what exactly?”
The Aptera 2e, pictured above.
“Towards what final price?”
A base price of $25k, and up to $45k if you load it up with all options and the most expensive powertrain.
” “pixiedust”, really gee, thanks”
I know you’d love all development information released at all stages, right away. So would their competitors. Stating more would either give away the manufacturer or any power buffering scheme used.
I know waiting is always painful. But for now, it’s still waiting time. I know that won’t make you happy, but that’s the reality of the situation.
FYI, Tesla had no competition during their development phase. Aptera is going to be out in the US before virtually all of its competitors, but the critical distinction is that there actually *are* competitors this time. A more appropriate comparison would be Tesla’s Model S, not the Roadster. Can you, for example, state the chemistry of Tesla’s Model S? Or the exact price a person who wants X options will pay? Or anything of that nature?
Of course Aptera will be out first because they went the 3 wheel route. This allowed them to skip the crash testing phase.
“I know waiting is always painful. But for now, it’s still waiting time. I know that won’t make you happy, but that’s the reality of the situation.”
No, I’m not in pain, just losing interest. As an early believer and depositor I’m losing respect for the company with each “newsletter” and web site “upgrade”.
I’m concerned that as an owners they’ll continue to treat us like children. It’s not the delay (expected that) it’s the b.s. What began as a “hell yeah!” for me 14 months ago is devolving into a “meh”. That’s not the way marketing is supposed to work.
I think all this secrecy on the specs of the vehicle is absurd…Chrysler is coming out with the Dogdge Circuit in 2009 or 2010 and you can view all the specs from
A to Z on the internet.
I agree with the comments about Aptera’s marketing and communication in the second post, I am also an early deposit holder and Aptera has consistently had terrible and misleading communication. Most of the press and related material from outside sources such as this article which has been written by die hard Aptera fan rather than an objective reviewer, this includes others like Popular Mechanics. I love this vehicle and the concept but Aptera has been nothing short of unprofessional and misleading about delivery time lines and delays. By the way the delays were not do to the above stated reasons and the delays are a full year. Aptera states the first production “intent” vehicle was released on the 16th but it really it is just another test vehicle. They claim now October as the new date but we will see. If they were straight forward they would not have so many upset customers. In addition the reservations are not really growing and they are now seeing many cancellations recently. I wish they would hire some real professionals over there who know how to communicate with customers. They have no idea how many people are seriously contemplating canceling.
Get it together Aptera, what you don’t know is hurting you! PS. They do treat their deposit holders like children.
“The delays were not do to the above stated reasons”
Only if you consider what the company stated a lie (check the transcript).
“but it really is just another test vehicle”
Only if you consider what the company stated a lie (check the transcript)
” I think all this secrecy on the specs of the vehicle is absurd…Chrysler is coming out with the Dogdge Circuit in 2009 or 2010 and you can view all the specs from
A to Z on the internet.”
So, who’s making its battery pack? What battery pack chemistry? When is first delivery? What options will be available, and how much will it cost with a given subset of options? What’s its crash test results? Surely if you’re trying to make a point about Aptera, I’d think you’d pick a vehicle for which the stats that people are criticizing Aptera for not having released have been released, no? Just the very fact that you have a two year range in your release dates (sometime in ‘09 or ‘10) didn’t occur to you?
I think Ms. Rei, nee Pearce, nee parrot lover is working for the company as their official cheerleader and should not be trusted. Why does Aptera not directly address the concerns of their buyers?
I agree with many of the non-Karen posts above. Why the huge secrecy and unacceptable delays??