futura
05-05-2009, 08:04 PM
Nice piece; not a lot of new stuff but sounds like they 'drove it'... and it was fun.
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_id=10&article_id=7919&print_page=y
The truck swerves; out the window pokes the driver's head, mouth agape, and neck contorted at an angle that's a chiropractor's case study. "Hey, that's cool!" truck guy yells. People are sucked out of nearby office buildings like nails yielding to the pull of an enormous cartoon magnet. Instead, they're reacting to the Aptera 2e, an intriguing 2-seat, 3-wheeled plug-in electric vehicle whose ultra-slippery shape is as attention-grabbing as it is aerodynamic. "Efficiency — that's the lens through which we look at the world," says Aptera President & CEO Paul Wilbur. Walk around this composite-body tadpole and the attention to airflow detail is evident: that pointed gecko nose, those wafer-thin wheel pants, the fairings easing the transition from the body to the front suspension arms, the upswept underside culminating in a horizontal knife-edge tail. The drag coefficient is 0.15, about half that of a typical subcompact car, a big part in achieving its claimed 100-mile range. A full charge takes 8 hours from a standard 110-volt outlet, about $1 in electricity at Southern California rates. Interestingly, the vehicle — calling it a "car" will draw the stink eye from every member of the team — was aerodynamically refined using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program called CD-adapco, with a Linux cluster of 48 computers crunching all the zeroes and ones. "We took the cue from Burt Rutan that CFD tools have come far enough along," says Aptera co-founder Steve Fambro, "that SpaceShipOne never had to see the wind tunnel. The nuances of making it very low drag when you bring the shape close to the ground are astounding, and occupy our aerodynamicist full time."
http://www.roadandtrack.com/assets/image/2009/W7/021120091542388046.jpg >>
If by wild chance you guessed there was some aeronautical inspiration here, you'd be right. Fambro is a private pilot with time in Diamond DA-20 and DA-40 composite aircraft (accruing flight hours when he wasn't engineering DNA-synthesizing nanobots at his former job); the other co-founder, Chris Anthony, just happens to be well versed in fluid dynamics and has much hands-on composite experience through designing wakeboard boats. Rounding out the team are Chief Engineer Tom Reichenbach, a vehicle dynamics guru who headed up the Ford GT and Shelby GT500 programs; and Chief Marketing Officer Marques McCammon who was most recently with Saleen. And Wilbur? He has decades of Detroit experience with Ford, Chrysler and ASC, that last stint involving the Chevrolet SSR. In all, it's an impressive confluence of Detroit niche production expertise and California entrepreneurial spirit.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/assets/image/2009/W12/320200917571.jpg >>
Enough background; time to drive the Aptera 2e, a pre-production prototype with a gutted interior but suspension calibration and an a/c motor/controller/battery pack combination that are close to final production spec. (The origins of these components are veiled in secrecy for the moment; pressed on the batteries, it's offered that their composition is "lithium-ion-phosphate-pixie dust.") Floor the...rheostat?...and the 175-14 front tires squeal from the immediate rush of maximum torque. With curb weight at a svelte 1700 lb. or so, the 2e feels quicker than its promised 0–60 acceleration of under 10 seconds. It's agile, way more fun than I thought it would be, and remarkably stable, with 70 percent of weight over those front drive wheels. Applying full juice while cornering at 30 mph or so results in wheelspin and a predictable, mild power-on push. Jumping off the gas...er, accelerator mid-corner creates little drama, as the grip of its fairing-enclosed 195-14 rear tire prevents the 2e's Nemo-like tail from fishtailing. This is all happening with the drive selector switch set to D3, the most aggressive — and power-consuming — setting, but even here the controller's delivery is linear, hitch-free and easy to modulate. Control efforts of the unassisted steering and brakes are reasonable (think Lotus Elise) and steering has good feel and natural self-centering.
Although licensed as a motorcycle — with the carpool-lane benefits that entails — the 2e will ultimately be subjected to the full battery of NHTSA automotive crash tests. The Aptera's structure appears to be of fiberglass/foam sandwich construction (Anthony offers that they're "lean-resin, fiber-rich materials...aircraft-quality composites at Wal-Mart prices"), but whatever the composition, the shell is strong. In the final assembly area, a total of 12 Aptera employees stand on the structure, eight of them on the roof, and this is after the shell has gone through NHTSA's standard roof-crush test. A total of four airbags — two frontal, two side — will be standard. A look at the body-in-white here also reveals its monocoque load-bearing construction (think Lotus again, this time the original Elite), with tubular subframes for the inboard coil-over front suspension and motorcycle-type rear trailing link.
Later, I'm riding with Reichenbach in another prototype whose interior and NVH fine-tuning are getting nearer to final form. (Incidentally, the target launch date is this October, at a price between $26,000 and $40,000, depending on options.) Entry past the gullwing doors takes practice...it involves a slight limbo-dance pelvic tilt...but once negotiated, the apertures are large and the doors themselves close with a satisfying whumpp. Inside, the T-shaped dash and center stack look reassuringly familiar, and there's very generous leg- and head room, and cockpit width that splits the difference between, say, a Morgan Plus 4 and a Toyota Corolla. What's quite unconventional is a canopy/windscreen that wouldn't be out of place on a Schweizer sailplane, and those wheel pants visible out the dramatically forward raked side windows, rising and falling with each bump of the road. And then there's humming...the muted whir of the electric motor, and Reichenbach himself, doing his best rendition of The Jetsons theme song. "When we have production vehicles, I've got to have this playing through the sound system," he says with a big electron-eating grin.
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_id=10&article_id=7919&print_page=y
The truck swerves; out the window pokes the driver's head, mouth agape, and neck contorted at an angle that's a chiropractor's case study. "Hey, that's cool!" truck guy yells. People are sucked out of nearby office buildings like nails yielding to the pull of an enormous cartoon magnet. Instead, they're reacting to the Aptera 2e, an intriguing 2-seat, 3-wheeled plug-in electric vehicle whose ultra-slippery shape is as attention-grabbing as it is aerodynamic. "Efficiency — that's the lens through which we look at the world," says Aptera President & CEO Paul Wilbur. Walk around this composite-body tadpole and the attention to airflow detail is evident: that pointed gecko nose, those wafer-thin wheel pants, the fairings easing the transition from the body to the front suspension arms, the upswept underside culminating in a horizontal knife-edge tail. The drag coefficient is 0.15, about half that of a typical subcompact car, a big part in achieving its claimed 100-mile range. A full charge takes 8 hours from a standard 110-volt outlet, about $1 in electricity at Southern California rates. Interestingly, the vehicle — calling it a "car" will draw the stink eye from every member of the team — was aerodynamically refined using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program called CD-adapco, with a Linux cluster of 48 computers crunching all the zeroes and ones. "We took the cue from Burt Rutan that CFD tools have come far enough along," says Aptera co-founder Steve Fambro, "that SpaceShipOne never had to see the wind tunnel. The nuances of making it very low drag when you bring the shape close to the ground are astounding, and occupy our aerodynamicist full time."
http://www.roadandtrack.com/assets/image/2009/W7/021120091542388046.jpg >>
If by wild chance you guessed there was some aeronautical inspiration here, you'd be right. Fambro is a private pilot with time in Diamond DA-20 and DA-40 composite aircraft (accruing flight hours when he wasn't engineering DNA-synthesizing nanobots at his former job); the other co-founder, Chris Anthony, just happens to be well versed in fluid dynamics and has much hands-on composite experience through designing wakeboard boats. Rounding out the team are Chief Engineer Tom Reichenbach, a vehicle dynamics guru who headed up the Ford GT and Shelby GT500 programs; and Chief Marketing Officer Marques McCammon who was most recently with Saleen. And Wilbur? He has decades of Detroit experience with Ford, Chrysler and ASC, that last stint involving the Chevrolet SSR. In all, it's an impressive confluence of Detroit niche production expertise and California entrepreneurial spirit.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/assets/image/2009/W12/320200917571.jpg >>
Enough background; time to drive the Aptera 2e, a pre-production prototype with a gutted interior but suspension calibration and an a/c motor/controller/battery pack combination that are close to final production spec. (The origins of these components are veiled in secrecy for the moment; pressed on the batteries, it's offered that their composition is "lithium-ion-phosphate-pixie dust.") Floor the...rheostat?...and the 175-14 front tires squeal from the immediate rush of maximum torque. With curb weight at a svelte 1700 lb. or so, the 2e feels quicker than its promised 0–60 acceleration of under 10 seconds. It's agile, way more fun than I thought it would be, and remarkably stable, with 70 percent of weight over those front drive wheels. Applying full juice while cornering at 30 mph or so results in wheelspin and a predictable, mild power-on push. Jumping off the gas...er, accelerator mid-corner creates little drama, as the grip of its fairing-enclosed 195-14 rear tire prevents the 2e's Nemo-like tail from fishtailing. This is all happening with the drive selector switch set to D3, the most aggressive — and power-consuming — setting, but even here the controller's delivery is linear, hitch-free and easy to modulate. Control efforts of the unassisted steering and brakes are reasonable (think Lotus Elise) and steering has good feel and natural self-centering.
Although licensed as a motorcycle — with the carpool-lane benefits that entails — the 2e will ultimately be subjected to the full battery of NHTSA automotive crash tests. The Aptera's structure appears to be of fiberglass/foam sandwich construction (Anthony offers that they're "lean-resin, fiber-rich materials...aircraft-quality composites at Wal-Mart prices"), but whatever the composition, the shell is strong. In the final assembly area, a total of 12 Aptera employees stand on the structure, eight of them on the roof, and this is after the shell has gone through NHTSA's standard roof-crush test. A total of four airbags — two frontal, two side — will be standard. A look at the body-in-white here also reveals its monocoque load-bearing construction (think Lotus again, this time the original Elite), with tubular subframes for the inboard coil-over front suspension and motorcycle-type rear trailing link.
Later, I'm riding with Reichenbach in another prototype whose interior and NVH fine-tuning are getting nearer to final form. (Incidentally, the target launch date is this October, at a price between $26,000 and $40,000, depending on options.) Entry past the gullwing doors takes practice...it involves a slight limbo-dance pelvic tilt...but once negotiated, the apertures are large and the doors themselves close with a satisfying whumpp. Inside, the T-shaped dash and center stack look reassuringly familiar, and there's very generous leg- and head room, and cockpit width that splits the difference between, say, a Morgan Plus 4 and a Toyota Corolla. What's quite unconventional is a canopy/windscreen that wouldn't be out of place on a Schweizer sailplane, and those wheel pants visible out the dramatically forward raked side windows, rising and falling with each bump of the road. And then there's humming...the muted whir of the electric motor, and Reichenbach himself, doing his best rendition of The Jetsons theme song. "When we have production vehicles, I've got to have this playing through the sound system," he says with a big electron-eating grin.