Aptera Gets $550,000 Crowd-Led Investment Round

Aptera has successfully raised over a half-million dollars through the crowd-investing site WeFunder. Over a thousand people were part of the investment round in the reborn electric vehicle company before the fledgling automaker really gets busy this coming year. It has promised to start delivering its hyper-efficient EV in 2021 with a starting cost between $34,000 and $59,000. In the funding documents, Aptera says those vehicles will have a per-unit initial target cost of between $21,000 and $36,000.

Aptera is releasing this sort of information to potential investors even though the company that it doesn’t specifically need the crowd investors and is “fully funded,” with over $2.5 million raised over the last few months. Aptera says it wanted to give people a chance to “invest early in more efficient transportation,” one that, “has a meaningful impact on people’s lives.”

That’s the feeling you get when you look over the company’s official releases, that this is about more than just the car. There’s plenty to ready about the company from the people involved, but this line seems to encapsulate the mission better than the rest: “With smarter engineering, we can use way less energy per mile to travel and far less material to build our vehicles.”

Aptera says its mission is to “deliver the most efficient vehicle on the planet” and the EV they’ve designed – and redesigned and reworked – is indeed efficient. The Aptera EV can go more than 1,000 miles on a full charge, and it gets 150 miles of range when plugged into a standard 110-volt outlet overnight. It uses just under 100 Wh per mile in everyday driving, the company says. Given the vehicle’s sleek aerodynamics and rooftop solar charging system, the company says it can go more than 40 miles a day just on solar power. Since that’s more than the average person drives (in the U.S., anyway), Aptera calls its vehicle “the first Never Charge electric vehicle.”

The vehicle has a fun side, too. Aptera has also come up with a camper version of the vehicle, and if you park it into the sun during the day, the convenient capsule can charge handheld electronics, power things like electrical stoves and even run the car’s heat or AC to keep you comfortable while you sleep.

Aptera’s history started in 2005, well before the crowdfunding era. The company had passionate fans and grew to over 50 employees by 2009, but the money ran out and the original company was liquidated in 2011.