Vaporware or not? Aptera assembles its first five validation models.

The vehicle seats just two occupants and their luggage, but it takes up a surprising amount of room on the road—it’s actually an inch and a half wider than the gargantuan Hummer EV, if you can believe it, a vehicle so wide it scarcely fits in parking spaces or EV charging bays.

Visits to those charging bays are meant to be rare; the EV aims to deliver a range of 400 miles (644 km) from a 44 kWh battery pack—10 miles/kWh (6.2 kWh/100 km) is the claim for the $40,000 launch edition. (Should Aptera succeed, it plans a much cheaper version with just 250 miles/402 km of range.) Its drag coefficient of 0.13 is lower even than Volkswagen’s 1980 ARVW concept, and while I can’t find a published frontal area for the Aptera, its cross-section is clearly much less than that of a standard car shape.

And as you’ll note from the pictures, that aero body is clad in photovoltaic panels that provide up to 40 miles (64 km) of range a day, Aptera says.

Third time’s the charm?

But Aptera, or some version of it, has been saying these things for 20 years now. The original incarnation of the company ceased operations at the end of 2011; among its woes then was the fact that the Obama-era ATVM loan program that helped Tesla so much would not fund a three-wheel vehicle, leading to years spent redesigning a four-wheel version.

In 2012, a Chinese OEM obtained Aptera’s intellectual property from one of the company’s creditors, promising that cars—now three-wheeled again—would be on sale by the end of that year. The following year, its plans had expanded to include a gasoline-powered version, but this incarnation went dark in 2014.

In 2019, Aptera’s original founders relaunched the venture and returned to work, trying to make their dream a reality. Plans for hub motors fell by the wayside in favor of a conventional drive unit, but the design was locked down, and journalists were able to ride in one of the prototypes last year at CES.