Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s a new car coming to market that will probably make its owners search out the sunniest spots in the parking lot...

Aptera Motors is designing and manufacturing this car: a plug-in electric hybrid that can run up to 40 miles on a single, solar-powered charge.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Steve Fambro shares how he and his co-CEO revived their once-defunct auto company thanks to the promise of solar energy. Plus, Steve’s take on why today’s vehicles require so much energy, and how Aptera’s novel design could change the way we think about cars forever...

This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening, add-free, on Wondery Plus.
0:04.0	Want to learn how to be a master of business
0:07.0	without going back to school?
0:09.0	Listen to the Planet Money MBA.
0:11.0	No suits, no power points,
0:13.0	just the secrets of business school delivered straight to your ears.
0:16.0	Every Wednesday till Labor Day on Planet Money from NPR.
0:20.0	Hello and welcome to how I built this lab.
0:24.0	I'm Guy Roz.
0:25.0	So when it comes to cars,
0:27.0	the internal combustion engine is probably going to go away over the next 50 years.
0:32.0	Every year electric cars are getting better and going farther,
0:36.0	but you still have to plug them in.
0:39.0	So imagine a car that can drive without having to plug it in at all.
0:44.0	A car powered by the sun.
0:46.0	It's not a new idea,
0:48.0	but it's a massively difficult one.
0:50.0	In part, because you need a lot of energy to power a car.
0:54.0	So to solve this problem,
0:56.0	a team of engineers in Southern California have designed a solar electric hybrid.
1:01.0	It's a car that can travel up to 40 miles simply on sunlight.
1:05.0	And the way they've done it is to streamline the design.
	...

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