How Environmental Friendly is the Aptera car?

[Holander]

So this car is expected to achieve 300 mpg as far as gas usage goes. This will definitely help save the environment if people really start buying these. What about the materials used to construct this Aptera Car? Are they environmental friendly as well?

[foundit]

From what I have heard, the seats and floors will be made out of recycled materials. Also they won't used any plasticizers for the dashboards which is a plus. All in all this car will be constructed with very environmental friendly materials and the end result will surely be environmental friendly. This is surely the future of automobiles.

[KarenRei]

The skin is made of carbon fiber composite. Carbon fiber is polyamide (nylon), cooked at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to drive off everything but the carbon, to make an incredibly high tensile strength fabric. This fabric is then placed in a mold, and epoxy is injected under pressure and allowed to set. The epoxy effectively makes some of the carbon fiber's tensile strength reinforce the epoxy's compressive strength, hence a composite.

Carbon fiber isn't recycleable, but it's lightweight and poses no environmental safety issues; it's inert and contains no heavy metals or anything bad like that.

The frame is mostly aluminum with some steel. Both are very recycleable.

The batteries are lithium ion. These are partially recycleable. If they still have life at the end of the car's service, they could potentially find use in grid load balancing or offgrid houses where energy density isn't important but low cost is.

The wiring is most likely copper. This is recycleable and always in demand. The motor windings are also most likely copper. Of course, unless the motor has wear problems, it'd just be reused, purchased from the scrapyard for some other task.

The rest is a whole mix of plastics, fabrics, metals, and so forth. Since they're paying enough attention to use recycled materials wherever possile, they'll undoubtedly do their best to make sure that as much of it is recycleable as possible.