Ride on
Monday, December 24th, 2007Whether you like it or not the days of the gas slurping mastodons are about to end. Okay, there are still a lot suvs (most of the suv drivers really look a lot like sportsmen don’t you think?) rolling by every day, but believe me it’s a species on the brink of extinction. I have to admit I’ve always wanted to drive these Cadillacs and Studebakers of the fifties and sixties. Still love to see them, but I wouldn’t like to be paying their fuel bills… .
So now, since that episode is almost over, let us look ahead. Many people made plans and presented futuristic drawings of ‘the car of the future’ but only very few actually tried to make one. Well, these guys did. And they didn’t just try, they really did it! The efforts of their team resulted in the Aptera, which is Greek for “wingless flight”. And this is how it looks.
Liking it or not is a personal thing. How it looks is however not the most important thing, well it shouldn’t be, what it can and cannot do is. For those of you who love to exceed all speed limits it’s probably not the perfect car yet. It won’t go faster than about 90 Mph or 140 km/h and if you hope to impress an old lady on the curb by racing away from the traffic lights don’t buy one. But you wouldn’t anyway. If you like the thought of driving 100 kilometers on only 1 liter gasoline however, this might be the one for you. It still could do with some restyling is my humble opinion but it’s a promising start. They even made a commercial for it, it’s not really dazzling but hey, they’re still young.
Now I suggest the designers /engineers contact The guys from Nanosolar and use their ink based solar foil for the cars top layer, so its batteries will be charged all the time.