YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Fambro

lines on the record: 44
first: 2024-02-15
most recent: 2024-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, thousand liters of cargo space, which is a comparison, any modern EV that's out there, you fold down the back seats and you get 1,000 liters of space? Or more in the Zaptera. So it's a, I mean, you can put surfboards in it, you can put a ladder in there, tools, you can put, you know, if you're like a Macedonian army reenactment person, you can put all your spears and stuff in there as well. I mean, it's an amazing amount of space.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's electric and mechanical release. So the most common way to do it is with a button that's right there on the armrest, but then there's sort of a backup mechanical release underneath it, which many EVs have that strategy now.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's vestigial. It's like saying you must have a clip for your whip on your buggy. You can't have your whip laying around in the buggy. Like there's no whip. There's no buggy. We don't need that. But it is a vestigial requirement. So we have the least amount of size required by law.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I drive the prototypes here all the time, but I want to drive a production version. So I have to fight probably Chris and a couple of other investors for the very first one.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely think so. I think Apter is going to show the way because the way technology is right now, there's no other way it's achievable without this extreme obsession with efficiency. There's no other platform out there that can do it. So the vehicles, the race for the high range, which I think is going to be the new era that you see unfolding in EVs when you look at where the innovations and innovations are, how do we get more range, I think you're going to see some common trends of aerodynamic shapes, lighter weight materials. And hopefully Aptera can maintain its lead in that position.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If the solar is going to be meaningful on the vehicle, if it's going to add a meaningful range, the vehicle is going to have to be aerodynamic, right? It can't just be a boxy flat-sided vehicle. So if it's going to be aerodynamic, it means you're going to have curves in 3D. So fundamentally, you're going to be making 3D curve panels. So that's number one. How do you bend those cells without cracking or microcracking, which will lead to a crack? And how do you do it repeatedly and consistently and then also make that panel very lightweight for an automotive application and then also make it affordable and also make it able to stand up to hail and rocks? That's what's required to make it practical. And that's what we've been doing for the past two years.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High 20s for the 250 mile version, which is the smallest battery pack, 25 kilowatt hour, and goes up to around 50,000, I think, for the highest configuration, 1,000 mile range three-wheel drive. So the options are basically battery pack size, and you want two-wheel drive or three-wheel drive. Those are the big cost drivers.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you think of it just as a modern car in terms of safety features. Rollover crush strength, airbag, seatbelts, interlocks, all that kind of stuff. Same stuff we have designed to the same standards. So not required for a motorcycle, but we're just trying to adhere to as many of the regular automotive standards that we as we can.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About 43,000 Ivers reservations, about $1.6 billion worth of vehicles. We believe we're pretty confident after about nine months of closing our series B funding somewhere between nine and 12 months, we could deliver the first vehicle. We still have lots of big things to do. We have to go through our airbag certification program. For example, we have to go through the ABS, the ABS braking system certification. For those that may not know, you can't just order that part and install it on the vehicle. It has to go through the manufacturer's own sort of certification process. So there's some things like that that we still have to do. And that's why we're fundraising the Series B.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what took us to Italy to CPC. Our partners have devised a very high throughput process, which to my knowledge, no one else in the world has this capacity and this ability to produce parts every four to six minutes, just like you were producing a steel part. So it's a strong composite thermoplastic, but without any of the hand labor and the waste and the cutting and the materials and all that other stuff, it just produces a nice part that comes right out of the mold, ready to be vinyl wrapped or just used without having to paint. It's a radically different way of producing the vehicle. There's only six structural pieces. And so being able to build the vehicle from six pieces is just order of magnitude, simplification of tooling fixtures, etc.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a combination of both the low drag, which the shape, the very curvatious, shark-like shape, and the lightweight is both of those are what really enabled the efficiency. And the lightweight comes from composites. Now the challenge with composites and the challenge with how we were doing them before and how Chris was doing with his boat company is very labor intensive and it doesn't really scale. And so what we wanted was a process that we could stamp them out like you would stamp out steel pieces and produce them as fast as you would a steel car.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it'll still charge. It might it might only charge 10 miles worth or 12 miles worth or something like that if it's overcast or in a northern latitude. And so the way to think about it is are you plugging it in once every six months? Are you plugging it in once every month? That's how it's going to impact people. Whether you get 30 miles a day, 40 miles a day, the launch vehicle is going to get around 400 miles range. It's really just going to affect are you plugging in monthly or maybe every two weeks or something like that? So that's how that difference in daily solar charge is going to manifest.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the same ethos and double down and triple down on efficiency in solar. So expect to see a family of vehicles from Aptera where this is a first, but all of them are going to have the same promise of kind of solar freedom and solar mobility”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aptera is a brand and the Apteraza product are going to appeal to people who want a kind of freedom, a freedom of mobility, a freedom to go and to move without being encumbered either by a charge cord or having to pay for electricity, that freedom from the old way of doing things is really what Apter is about. There's lots of electric car choices out there and lots of electrified cars, cars that are just steel boxes with electric components shoved in them. Those are all great products for different customers and they'll sell lots of them, but that's not what we're about. We're about solar mobility and we're about giving that freedom to people. And the first vehicle that you see, of course, a two-seater, that's the tip of the sword. But there's a product portfolio and vehicles that are coming behind that that are going to embark.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right. You're looking at 25% or so conversion efficiency once it's all sort of encapsulated in a matrix. And if you tried to do this to any large electric vehicle, it's barely going to budge the needle. So the advantage of designing for efficiency and being a brand that's really grounded in efficiency above all else is that these kind of things become possible. And we can use a smaller battery pack. It's going to mean less cells and less costs for the battery and hopefully a lower cost to the consumer, more range, less charge time, et cetera, et cetera. That's the direction that we push stuff. It's to push to more and more efficient using less and less energy along the way. How do we keep reducing the amount of energy that the vehicle uses while expanding the amount that we're producing on the solar panels?”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Correct. You plug it in like normal if you want, but most people won't ever have to because you're in Southern California. You'll probably get about 11,000 miles a year of free charge.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It made our eyes open because we knew from some little bit of research that we had done that range wasn't the most, but it was a very important factor in deciding to buy an electric car, which electric car people wanted to buy. And if you could control the range factor, then you could really control a significant part of the market. And that was our premise is how do we blow up range? How do we own range? And we do that with efficiency and that was really the genesis of the restart.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Chris, of course, owning this battery company and us talking about it, the numbers and said, well, with the new technology, how many batteries could we fit in an Aptera anyway? And so we just started doing some back of the napkin calculations. With these new batteries, we could foot 100 kilowatt hours in that vehicle and 100 watt hours per mile, which is what we achieved with the old Aptera, about 95 watt hours per mile, which is extremely efficient. That would be a thousand miles. And so that kind of just...”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Help us navigate the waters. When you're connected with someone like that, it's not just about sort of lobbying for loans and programs. It's also making sure you have a seat at the table with. Different regulatory bodies or that you have the right legal oversight, protection and certain regulatory affairs. We were just sort of kicking around the idea saying, look, you know, who is it? There's just Tesla, really. There's no one else. And why is that? And everything is just an electrified car. It's not really designed. It doesn't appear to be designed from scratch as an electric vehicle”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they didn't really do much of anything with it. And I think even the company that one of the people that bought the assets of the first auction, they ended up with a bunch of the older vehicles sitting in a warehouse up somewhere in Northern California that we've, you know, Chris and I have tried to locate just for sentimental reasons. But yeah, they were sort of cast to the four corners of the earth and the IP, the products and tools and nothing ever really happened with it. And it just kind of sat as an idea in my mind and Chris's mind and Jason, a few others for basically until we were able to bring it back to life.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was more industrial. Production, but indoors. But the idea of growing food is densely packed in three dimensions as you could and then only expanding it out at the time of harvest so that you could, in the smallest amount of space with the least amount of energy and least amount of water. Raise the highest amount of biomass per square per unit area per unit time.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, I tried to channel all of that grief into positive energy. The day I left Apera originally, you know, I always maybe two or three weeks before I had my first signed term sheet for my new company. And I just tried to put all of that thought and grief into energy, into momentum, into something different. But it's analogous to the loss of someone that you love and you never really get over it.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's basically it. We wanted to make sure if we're there getting a salary, that we're adding value and all moving in the same direction. And I think the direction that the team and the board wanted to move was the four-wheel and the DOE loan. And so we felt that we would probably add more value to something new and something different. The professional team was in place. you know, sort of left in charge.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's exactly right. And so they had used a lot of the same concepts and ideas to design a four-wheel vehicle. I think that's what they were trying to get through the DOE at the time.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember he had a single slide on a PowerPoint with sort of a piece of ham where all the ham was gone and a knife on it bone saying cut to the bone. That was his advice to all of the startups at the time. And so we recognize that the team, the professional team that we hired, they were working with the Department of Energy to get a loan and to bring in a four-wheel vehicle. And with the cutting to the bone mentality, we thought maybe the company would be in better hands if we left it to the professionals and we would go off and start. You know, another company, and that's what Chris did, and that's what I did.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it was a tough time for any startup at that time. I remember a lot of the VCs we were talking to, they were, at that time, it was the economic downturn. It was gloom and doom. I still remember Bill Gurley prominent Silicon Valley VC at the time.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was a really big, that conference was a really pivotal event for us because it put us on the map. It got a lot of press. It introduced us to lots of investors. And we went on to raise probably another $40 million or so at the time before we left the company.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We believe that electric was the future. It made all the sense in the world. We don't need to be burning hydrocarbons, even if they're very efficient. There's better ways to power a vehicle. And that was with electricity.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were working 20 hour days. We were doing all the work ourselves, welding, wiring, and everything else. And it was just lots and lots of long hours. And, you know, that was just the only way to do it. And then the sort of production intent version, the Mark I launched September 27th, I think it was, 2007. And on the day that we said we would, around January or so, we told our board and everyone else this is when we were going to launch it and it launched that day.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our first investor was a business incubator in Pasadena called Idea Lab. And they were instrumental in getting us off the ground and connecting us with ongoing funding. And we actually had the first prototype, I think within about six months of funding. And it was really just myself, Chris, and a young engineer.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a fundamental discovery that I made early on in the process. This is not the free stream. This doesn't need to be a symmetrical, sort of an airfoil or a teardrop. This needs to look different because it is in what they call ground effect.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, if you can, since we're on voice and radio or audio, rather I'll describe it if you can imagine the shape of a shark maybe flattened out in the middle, but without the fins, and then with two wheels in the front of where the mouth is and a wheel in the sort of the back where the tail is, that's kind of what After looks like. There's actually a lot of biomimicry there because sharks other fish that swim near the bottom of the ocean or a lake in what they call ground effect where you're not in the free stream but you're down very low to the surface those creatures also camber their back like aptera is cambered and that radically reduces the drag coefficient”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, what? Like, did she even hear what I just said? You know, I don't maybe she didn't understand. She's also an electrical engineer. And so she had an appreciation of the challenge ahead.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, I want to quit Illumina and start a car company. And, you know how every woman I think goes through pregnancy, they have different experiences. Some have bouts of sickness or immense joy. And my wife was a ladder. She was just whatever hormones were in her body because of that made her extremely happy about everything. And so I remember I told her that I'm quitting to start a car company. She's kind of smiled and said, okay, Han, that's great.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's very interesting. It's an interesting question and also situation for the reasons you've just said. I had every reason to stay there. I would have been retired by now from the money I would have made on my stock options had I kept them and not liquidated to start Aptera. My friends at Illumina remind me of that often. But I remember once I saw that the only way I could do this was full-time, raise money full-time and build the company. And I went home and I told my wife, I said, honey, she was like six months pregnant, by the way, our first child.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, once I saw what was possible, we said, well, let's ask in engineering, oftentimes you'll set a term to zero. You won't know the answer, but you'll set a term in an equation to zero or infinity to kind of see what the equation does. And so I just sort of ask myself rhetorically, what is a drag shape with a frontal area of x? And x is just basically two people sitting side by side, but with the coefficient of zero, what does that look like? And what does that shape look like? And once we determine what that was through our research, we believe that with the diesel engine at the time, we could achieve over 300 miles per gallon. And so we built the company around that and we started fundraising and got our first investor. And it was off to the races.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, we both are, you know, I had my own shop full of tools, welder and mini-lathe. And I, of course, could make circuits and things like that as well. So I was pretty handy myself. He was also handy with hand tools. And he could, Chris is a bit of a polymath, so he has many different talents. He's actually a finance guy by training. But I could see sort of by. make things that he can visualize, which is really a unique trait. And as we are talking about some of these problems and how we might build the structure or how it might need to be shaped to carry the load, he could easily visualize, whereas maybe I would need to do more math to convince myself of something”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's kind of like that. You have this wake in perpetuity that you can sort of surf behind or even do wakeboard tricks and stuff behind. And at Mission Bay here in San Diego, it's pretty popular, yeah.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wanted the boat to be dreadful. Yes. Apparently, it is a thing. I didn't even know it was a thing. I don't get out much.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he had a company called Epic Boats, and he was using these computational fluid dynamic tools to make the boat have more drag, so to make a bigger wake. So you could have more fun.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you know, I was, my wife and I at the time, we didn't have any children. And so this meant that, you know, Saturday mornings I could lay out my drawings on the living room floor. I could drink coffee all day. I could work in the garage, you know, without distraction. And it was just a hobby. And at some point, I thought, you know, I'm probably not the only person that wants this. I should think about how would I make this and sell it. I'd have to have a business plan. So I worked with someone, I've never written a business plan. I was an entrepreneur. So I kind of started from there.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm sure it's better now. Yeah, at the time, I think it was around 14 miles per gallon, and I could squeeze out 17 if I did all these tips and tricks. But You know, you could see once you ask a question and see it in the following perspective of basically a continuous lineage from sort of Roman carts to horse and carriages to modern cars, you can see that, yeah, four corners, a wheel under each corner and just various manifestations of that. And so it's understandable how none of that would really change it, it would just kind of slightly evolve. And I thought what was needed to be the most efficient was a rethink of the platform to have the least weight and the least aerodynamic drag possible.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is amazing how that is, you know, but it's like I use the bed of it twice. before I sold it. So I'm thinking to myself, I was also a student pilot at the time, so I had an understanding of aerodynamics. And I was just thinking about aerodynamics and planes and looking up at the planes and saying, you know, the planes are flying by. I'm staying still. And then look at these vehicles. They're all boxy, even my own. It's just this big boxy thing. And so I started doing little things like I would fold my mirrors back or, you know, let down my tailgate and try and see on a long trip if I could get more gas mileage. And then, you know, I just did some reading and I said, wait a minute, these cars, 60% of the energy is just pushing the air out of the way. Right.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was doing what everybody does in San Diego that works south. You're sitting on the highway, a freeway, driving 10 to 15 miles an hour and stop and go traffic. And I was one of, I was driving a forward F-150 pickup truck. I was one of those people. I'm like, you know.”
2024-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT