Part 3/3 Aptera Update with Chris Anthony May 2024 

Yes that sounds good but that has to be a subset, if in fact not a subset of a subset of the regularly population. Aptera is still a mystery to most so I would not place to much value into that report right now.

YOSSS!!!

You are absolutely right it's not guaranteed so you won't be angry when the electric trike never materialises. It won't be Chris's fault so don't blame him or ask for your money back.

Next step is funding and what ever restructuring it requires.

@@artsmith103 Not really, I am discussing tangible deliverables, while new funding is means, which is indeed required to reach production. PI will happen independently of new fundings IMO and is likely to be substantially completed (rolling with battery pack and working solar), before funding is. However new fundings is required for assembly line.

@@artsmith103 As Chris conveyed, there are multiple "next steps"…. along tech & funding lines. An EV/tech startup that ignores funding is just a proof of concept; one that doesn’t push tech (in design & fabrication like Aptera) is unlikely to entice investors, and thus also doomed as a business.

I hear ya, I'm there with you. I've been holding out for an Aptera, but I keep seeing how much prices have dropped in the used EV market, and it's really tempting. Still holding out for Aptera for the time being though.

If it becomes a flash in the pan, the value goes up.

I’m ready for the 1st annual Aptera Cannonball Run Rally June 20, 2026 (coincides with the summer solstice). 7am start!!

@@dougbrittsan-yn9sl I'd like to make it a Solar Cannonball Run open to any street legal EV, but we all know who the winner would be! Smash the record of the one and only participant so far.

Yes, stated succinctly & diplomatically.

I think it’s far more calculated than a leap of faith. I’ve modeled the lower production scenarios with both body styles, and they’re both difficult to climb out of and generate enough capital to expand in their own.

It was a leap of faith, but the alternative was to never meet the demand. And CPC, CTNS, and probably others we haven't even heard of also gambled on the risk. It's all on the hands of the public now.

That was hilarious!

You meant Chris, not Steve I presume.

@@bertrandp2977 yes! You are right. I made the correction.

I am surprised the May update didn't show us what they do have done. The background had what I assume is PI-1, a camera sweep over it would have been great to see. Hopefully the next update will.

I'm really expecting a look at the PI build after the webinar. Although from what Chris is saying there probably isn't much to look at yet. I'm betting PI1 will be much more photogenic at the end of June, even without a chassis.

So it is “Initial Private Offering” instead of “Initial Public Offering” I wonder at what price?

@@Kukaboora Not to be negative (I am an Accelerator investor in Aptera), but the terms will almost certainly favor these new investors, despite the fact that they are arguably taking less risk than earlier investors. This is the "smart money" - sophisticated investors with substantial means. Because Aptera is not producing a viable product and therefore is not profitable a public offering would probably not justify the initial cost and ongoing overhead versus the dilution a market pricing of Aptera would probably impose - to get the money needed to start production they might have to just give the company away to public shareholders and Steve and Chris would lose control. So this is the middle ground. The new investors will get terms in between what we enthusiasts have been willing to accept (I don't realistically expect to get my money back, I just want Aptera to happen) and what the public market would offer (see valuations of other EV startups at the moment) because these new investors have a situation where the risk/return balance makes sense AND they have accepted that financial reporting/controls/governance will not meet public company standards for now.

​@christopherbrand5360 Wow, very accurate helpful description, especially coming from an Accelerator donor. I think this was one of Aptera's more misleading interviews. As knowledgeable as you are, you must have heard it. Good luck.

@@artsmith103 "donor" hahahaha! Why do you say this was a misleading interview? Having had some exposure to investment banking and capital markets, it is not surprising that Chris Anthony did not lay out all of the details. I just wished for them. It is entirely likely that he is constrained regarding what he can share about the offering and the arrangement with U.S. Capital. The requirement to keep certain terms and details confidential (short term or indefinitely) is not unusual in advance of an offering and is not deceptive or malicious. Some of this is based on securities regulations and some of it is common practice but it is all about the tension between Aptera getting the capital they need with the minimum burden, investors getting attractive opportunities to grow their money, and the investment bank getting compensated for bringing everyone together and facilitating the transaction.

@@christopherbrand5360 Agree with everything again. I'm not critical of any missing info. I heard Aptera trying to oversell confidence in US Capital to placate the fan boys. Based on who/what US Capital is, I would have expected you to hear that also.

They filed a patent for it if you're very curious about it. Probably a few years away because it requires a heat pump to function properly.

​@chrisrudzinski6241 but the heat pump would be the easiest part. Even at higher delta T, apparently they can't exchange enough btus.

Not needed. RU-vidrs and influencers will do that on their own.

Thank you so much!

I believe I saw someone mention that the May 30 SEC filing specified 29 full-timers. Don't know about trends.

@@michaelbramel5771 Thx

@@michaelbramel5771 Thx

I bought a new Bolt as an interim. With the $7,500 rebate and other incentives (Costco and military discount) Paid a little over %18,000 for it. Hard to be that deal. Still holding out for my Aptera and can now wait a bit longer.

Agree that having reliable transportation in place until Aptrae are being produced makes waiting easier...and the lack Theriot makes it harder. I think a decent Plan B is to get something else and buy an Aptera a few years down the road. They are likely to be improved vehicles as time passes, anyway.

The Canadian Federal Government currenly has a program that provides $5000 rebates on EV purchases under $60,000. However, the Aptera is currently not on the eligiblilty list. Given that it is an autocycle and not a motorcycle, it should be added to the elgibility list. You can take a look at the IZEV website and contact them.

This is something Americans should be talking to their representatives about too. Aptera is probably talking to them too.

Securing the funding before validation and testing is complete means it will be that much sooner that production can begin. They can begin tooling up now and only tweak it if problems show up in testing.

Aptera was clearly unable to raise $60 million from crowdfunding. They announced what they needed to begin production in Nov of 2023. I think they were pretty patient to wait 7 months, but they're obviously eager to get started. This was kind of expected. Even if that big investor had come along, there would probably have been strings attached. That's just the nature of the business. Aptera's going to go public soon. There will have to be changes but hopefully Chris and Steve will keep on course.

@@richardryley3660 But Aptera did not name it production funding, did it? It was called accelerators for people to compete on the first place to get the first Aptera. It was designed for the well to do, the rather sick elites. It was not designed for the common mass.

@@Kukaboora "Sick elites"? No bias there, right? Who exactly do you think the Accelerators are? Accelerator funding wasn't funding production anyway. Just the production of the PI builds, validation and crash testing.

⁠@@richardryley3660 A bunches of sick and big egos, who try to outdo one another with their spared money. Who try to earn the right to pound their chest and to proclaim “I am first” Yes I am in this case and this sense, totally bias.

Before there is a conversation with the Secretary of Transportation, there needs to be a solid PI build that has passed the crash tests and is really close to production. I had thought that when Gamma was introduced that it would be a great opportunity but when I saw Gamma and that it fell very short of what my employers would consider a gamma vehicle, I was glad such a meeting had not been arranged. Any vehicle that is shown needs to be 100% rock solid and not a prototype.

@@ddessert6 Absolutely! Hope Aptera and fans understand and support this.

The current Secretary of Transportation was once running in the primaries for nomination for President in his party. At 1st, he seemed well spoken, but then it became apparent that he listened more to lobbyists than to We The People. I became very disappointed when he held a dinner in a wine cave with some muckity mucks and that's when I realized he'd be just like the majority of po9liticians where money speaks louder than the voices of his constituents. To me, that was a bogt disappointment. Making me worry that he would much rather listen to what Mary Barra has to say than either of the 2 Co-CEOs of Aptera. I hope I'm being too pessimist about him. Despite that, I do believe this vehicle will have massive appeal, even without incentives.

So we can agree that the election system is very flawed. Forcing even good man to have to relinquish some of his control for Money. I think the key though, is what is the Goal of the candidate, if there allowed to do what they want. And it takes all Citizens to be civic minded and press our legislators in a way that sets us moving forward, with the less harm to our society, and the environment.@@fanfare100

If they had stuck to their original plans, most of us, myself included, would still not yet have received our vehicles. If they're only building 3 to 5,000 a year it takes a long time to fulfill 50,000 orders

@@GoClimbARockEh I was ~ the ten thousandth pre-order, so yeah you are probably right would have made no difference for me.

They originally promised to make 171 aptera in 2020 😂

We only know it will have regenerative breaking but not what it entails (levels?, programmable?).

We know the regen braking will be configurable. Which is a good thing. Tesla guys love one pedal driving, I do not, I have an Arcimoto with a regen trigger. Very fun and unique kind of regen.

Yeah, that's software. The Elaphe motors will be capable of it, but it will have to be seen how it's programmed.

I’m also an accelerator and reluctantly switched to the LE. My thinking is that I get the LE early in the game, drive it a ton, then resell it. Hopefully by then, I can quickly order the one I want. Who knows, maybe I can sell my stock to pay for Aptera #2?!

I'm pretty sure that Accelerators opting for non-LE models will be at the front of the line when those models do become available.

With full scale production they will probably get the pre-orders out of the way pretty fast. So assuming you're talking about the higher range options, it's a matter of how soon they start turning their attention to designing those bigger battery packs. Unfortunately, I don't know if those special batteries are in production yet. If so it'll probably only be a couple of years, if not, it could be 2030 or later.

The Accelerator vehicles have always been serialized Launch Editions. Let your wishful thinking go. You accept your Accelerator LE, then sell it when your dream build comes around that you have earlier reserved. The Accelerator Program comes with its own reservation, and your build order depends on your rank.

That's a good question, maybe US Capital takes a percentage of each transaction. If they do, what percentage? If they don't, how do they get paid?

Funny, I would have it reversed. PI is as production, while delta is feature complete.

@@bertrandp2977 Previous videos on this channel have stated that the parts going into the PI will be customed made and for some of those parts they will be switching other suppliers when the PI validations are complete because those suppliers are not willing to build and ship them a limited number of parts for testing. Production "Intent" as in the objective of the build is to prove the actual Production vehicles will work as intented aka design validation. Building the PIs does not prove they have the ability to produce in quantity, still missing the necessary funding for that.

@@chrisrudzinski6241 The first run of soft tooled PI parts would be functionally identical to large volume parts. I'd expect these soft tooled parts to go to production as previously stated. Running changes and improvements will follow. Will small tweaks be made from PI to production? Probably so, but I wouldn't expect much.

By the time PI16 is complete, Aptera should have worked out any of the test designs and will have validated and finalized all designs of the various components. The components on the production vehicles may be hard tooled and not soft tooled, but they should be identical in every way to the PI parts. The original Delta design probably would not have even had hard tooling. The bodies would have been made by hand. If that is not what "Delta" or "Production Intent" means then sure, I don't claim to be an expert, but I assumed that's what PI builds were. A synonym of Delta. Or even skipping Delta and going straight to production intent.

@richardryley3660 Except they are not, at best, they are a half measure. Per Aptera's original development plan of Alpha>Beta>Gamma>Delta. The Delta vehicles were supposed to be manufactured on the final production/assembly lines so that while the Delta vehicles were being tested/validated and crash tested the Aptera engineers would also be rectifying any deficiencies they found on the assembly lines. Clearly, the PIs will not allow Aptera to perform these other validations because they do not have the funding to buy the tooling. Now I acknowledge that much has changed since then and it looks like CPC will take over most of the vehicle's production, but still doesn't change the fact that the Deltas would have done so much more for Aptera had the funding been secured.

I do that on my Android phone all the time.

I made a comment on Aussie Idea Man's video about the patent application being "final rejected". It does NOT mean Aptera cannot go forward.....

Trolls are going to troll.

@@GullWingInnMoclips So bringing Aptera related facts to the conversation is trolling now?

@@johnreeves7261 I was referring to the Aussie ideas man, not you.

You experts giving out free advice are so generous!

Because he has got a lot to hide....

Did you see nervousness, hear it, or both? At that point he was offering up some information without being questioned about it. No reason to be nervous, nor did I interpret any nervousness.

I think he was very focused on trying to present a positive spin on US Capital. I think he was distracted trying to maintain the spin, keep his story straight.

How is US capital going to raise $100,000,000 ?

More like 2026

@@RomanChaar If you look into US Capital Global, you will see that they are basically a venture capital group. It is their business to attract investments for a project like this. While $100M might sound like a great deal of money to you and me, in the scale of things, $100M is almost pocket change. If we were talking $1B then that is a bit more of a challenge. If we say Aptera needs $100M, they don't need that on Day 1 and it would be foolish for USCG to provide the entire amount all at once. There will almost certainly be a dispersion plan where certain milestones will need to be met before more money is granted. Unless the economy tanks, USCG should be able to raise $100M in 6 months. Hopefully next week we will see such a plan.

Depends on what you're concerned about. If its fixing the Aptera vehicle if a part breaks then Aptera has been adamant that they will support you in getting the vehicle back on the road. If you're worried about how well this vehicle can be repaired post collision well imo this vehicle will probably not be very repairable. Aluminum chassis repair is almost always not feasible when you consider the difficulty, time, and money investment. Then there is of course the CF body which is very rigid but also very brittle in comparison to traditional steel bodies. When manufactures design cars they actually come up with recommended repair procedures for their vehicles and Aptera seems to have implied replacement is their preferred method. That might sound great until you consider that the CF part most likely to be damaged is the large tub which also has most of the vehicle's other parts attached to it, probably requiring a massive amount of disassembly to replace. Even if the part is cheap the labor involved in replacing it won't be.

Really depends on how much detail is provided in the manuals.

The temporary parts are being used to complete the early PI builds for testing. Once the designs are finalized they can be refitted with the final parts.

That was answered in the first two parts. Those have been burning questions of my own too.

In short, when Aptera started getting 45,000+ preorders on the site, they realized there was a greater demand than they were expecting. They could have started producing Apteras at one a day (Gamma's honeycomb composite body has to be laid out and injected with resin by hand) but scaling up would have been expensive and needed a huge workforce. They realized that the could start production with Delta, but they would never meet the demand, and would have to start over from the beginning if they ever earned enough capital to scale up. So the shopped around and found CPC. CPC said that they could produce CF SMC body panels that could turn out up to 40 Aptera's a day per shift. And the body would be both stronger than honeycomb composite (I assume, since it's more similar to fiberglass) and be more consistent in its behavior. They took the risk of delaying production by two years to redesign the body. PI is Delta. It is not hand built, it is hand assembled. The body was pressed in Italy and is indentical to the bodies that will be used in vehicles sold to customers - which was the whole point of using a consistent method of production.

@@richardryley3660 Tesla produced 2500 roadsters in it's first 5 years. Low volume production seems to have worked out well for them in the early stages. Face it guys, you are being played here - more excuses will follow, mark my words.

@@bluetoad2668 Do you see Roadsters in production today?

I may be wrong but I thought the UAE Gold Edition was a very limited number of vehicles. 53 comes to mind but then again I might be off by a few.

Autocycles, not trikes

@@ddessert6 I never heard a specific number.

@@danam0228 An autocycle is a mix between a motorcycle and a car. A trike is a three wheel vehicle. Since I ride motorcycles, this vehicle is a trike.

@@JoeBManco No, an autocycle, which is what aptera calls this and how people will need to register it, has 2 wheels upfront and one in the back. A trike which are registered as motorcycles has one wheel upfront and two in the back like a tricycle, hence the name trike. Got it?

Steve typically records in the evening. I think Chris’ reaction is more about the confidence and perhaps relief with the progress to date.

Perhaps a CEO that sleeps on the production floor?

The two of them typically converse for an hour and these interviews happen only once every couple months, and since Aptera gets their best coverage from Steve, Chris probably was planning on going the full hour. Chris's work right now is to do PR since a lot of his other work is in stasis as they wait for the capital raise.

I record these in the evenings because I have a day job.

I think Chris is a technical person who transitioned (very well) to a manager instead of a manager who is trying to learn the technical aspects of a business. I think Chris finds talking with Steve much more exciting than dealing with staffing, budgets, contracts and funding. Also, a manager who runs around like a chicken with its head cut off is not a good manager.

Yes that's what I suspected but I wanted to be sure.

I'll warn you, that was some of Aptera's worst misleading discussion.

Let's look at a real estate listing. A broker agrees to represent the seller for a commission. This agreement calls for them to be paid if they get the place sold within a certain time frame no matter how the buyer came to them. The broker then advertises, shows and holds open houses. They absorb those expenses expecting to recoop them when a sale is made. It would not be fair if after they put in that effort, somebody could circumvent them and their earned commission. If USC advertises and informs their pool of clients representing Aptera as a good investment, they should be rewarded for their efforts. If they put together advertising and investment seminars then someone buys the product through Republic, that would be unfair.

@@glennzajic7318 they'll be back to ask for more money from existing investors before the year is out - sunk cost fallacy is just too good not to milk.

I mean... yeah. They spent it on production parts. That's why they got investments, because they needed money to spend. That's how business works.

How TF do you think we got to this point, Sherlock?

That $8.4 trillion Trump added to the National Debt has a lot to do with the current economy. Let's hope 2nd Trump/Biden debate will be by jail phone.

It's amazing what maggots can be made to believe.

Did Trump's large tax break for large corporation and the very rich not trickle down to you yet?

For those who are haters (uneducated with facts) Just look up the stats for those years and tell me how they compare to the current train wreck.

Let's leave politics out of this friend

Thank you again Jerry!