Aptera is a thing again? I remember reading about it when I was in high school over a decade ago. I thought they smashed their prototypes and went bankrupt?
The original Aptera went bankrupt a decade ago. However couple of the original cofounders managed to get some funding to buy back the name and some of the original IP and restarted the company a couple of years ago.
Their homepage is claiming up to "40 miles of solar powered driving per day" and "1,000 miles on a single charge". Even given the size and layout of the vehicle, that seems impressive as heck if true. It's in reservation stages for ~$26k, which is also not bad.
When I was in college, the car was being advertised as 100 MPG. The car looks virtually the same, if you can get 100MPG you can probably get insane ranges without huge batteries.
It's basically a motorcycle on three wheels, those things have great milage.
> It's basically a motorcycle on three wheels, those things have great milage.
The mileage really varies on a lot of things. Cruising on the highway with some side cases and a little bit of gear I usually only get like 35ish MPG on my 1050cc bike, into the low 40s without any cases and with my windshield fully down/off. Fully loaded with camping stuff I'd only get like 30mpg. My 650cc bike with some cases as well got like 40ish, mid 40s without any cases, but really didn't have enough power to feel great when needing to overtake on highways with big trucks.
Some really small motorcycles will get into the 80s, but its really not a given that motorcycles have high mileage numbers.
I agree that on highways motorcycles' horrible drag (easily 2x of cars) results in terrible fuel economy considering their size.
Around town at low speeds (therefore drag is negligible), size becomes an asset, and a small motorcycle or scooter can get very good fuel economy, assuming it doesn't have an insanely overpowered engine.
An electric motorcycle or scooter around town is extremely efficient.
The Aptera (which blurs the line between motorcycle and car) gets 10 miles/kWh! By comparison the Model 3 (the most efficient current mass market EV) gets 4 miles/kWh.
