Posted on 12/05/2011 7:42:35 AM PST by Abathar
Electric car maker Aptera Motors is closing after failing to woo enough investors to bring a new sedan to market.
Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur said the Carlsbad, Calif.-based company closed its doors Friday and laid off all 30 of its employees.
The company was hoping to get a $150 million loan from the Department of Energy but needed to raise matching funds, Wilbur said. He said Aptera had trouble drumming up interest from investors, who have been spooked by the difficulties other small electric car makers have had. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla Motors Inc., for example, has racked up millions of dollars in losses as it prepares to bring its electric Model S sedan to market in mid-2012.
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Well, good luck with that...
This was their 3-wheeled prototype vehicle. They better put a red flag on the back of that thing, a biker could put his eye out.
Why didn’t they call it the “Sperm”?
The Tesla factory is right down I-880 from Solyndra.
Dumb.
Correction. It was scheming to pilfer 150 million dollars from the American taxpayers.
Precisely.
Designer-genius R. Buckminster Fuller was one of the century's great nutjobs, a walking unorthodoxy who originally conceived of the Dymaxion as a flying automobile, or drivable plane, with jet engines and inflatable wings.
It would be one link in his vaguely totalitarian plan for the people to live in mass-produced houses deposited on the landscape by dirigibles.
Okayyyy...Deprived of wings, the Dymaxion was a three-wheel, ground-bound zeppelin, with a huge levered A-arm carrying the rear wheel, which swiveled like the tail wheel of an airplane. The first prototype had a wicked death wobble in the rear wheel.
The next two Dymaxions were bigger, heavier, and only marginally more drivable. The third car had a stabilizer fin on top, which did nothing to cure the Dymaxion's acute instability in crosswinds.
A fatal accident involving the car cause unknown doomed its public acceptance.
Though unworkable, this three-wheeled suppository was the boldest of a series of futuristic, rear-engined cars of the 1930s, including the Tatra, the Highway Aircraft Corporation's "Fascination" car and, everybody's favorite, the Nazi's KdF-wagen.
History Repeating
Aptera few months,
Green always turns Brown.
Ping.
Not just the looks.....the taxpayers were going to get screwed.
Yeah. and so will a lot of our "obamamoney".
But, but...........aren’t we supposed to be liberal? Aren’t we supposed to want clean green energy, and clean green cars? Isn’t Obama creating clean green jobs, by subsidizing clean green companies???????
Or look at another way, isn’t it evil capitalism which is causing this company to fail, and aren’t we supposed to hate evil capitalism? So aren’t we supposed to subsidize this company so they can give us what is good for us (tiny electric car) rather than a vehicle we really want???
Do they still have Trabants in the former East Germany? I wonder if those people loved that little proletarian car produced by their people’s republic??????????
The classic Morgan three-wheeler is a much more handsome car than that pile of rubbish.
The problem is not that they wanted to steal, the problem is that they didn’t want to steal.
Had they requested a billion and kicked half of it back there would be no problem.
They were non union to boot
Obama’s green jobs scam was just to get money in the pockets of his friends, remember all those green jobs speeches, scam , scam ,scam
Whew, the taxpayers squeaked past that one.
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