We all know the Aptera is a two-seat automobile that may approach perfection as personal transportation.
We also all know that folks discount Aptera's utility as a family vehicle because of its two seats.
Now imagine that 'family of four' contemplating camping at some state park a couple of hundred miles away. This family has two Aptera's, neither of which can get the whole family where it is going.
SOL? Not really.
Why not take both Aptera's. You'd have oodles of extra space for camping gear. Certainly power at the camp would be more than covered (120vac outlets on each car) and I suspect with a little hacking here and there you could rig a zoom session between the vehicles for that 'togetherness' thing. (The advantage of zoom is mean Little Suzie can't bite sweet-Bud in a backseat altercation:)
"But that is so wasteful; taking too cars! your Aunt screams.
Think about it. The Aptera is the world's most efficient EV traveling over 10 miles for every 1000 watts consumed. That means taking both on the trip lowers the efficiency of the Aptera duo to somewhere above 5 miles per KWH ... which is still more efficient than your average EV.
I can only proclaim this revelation with the term Sarah Hardwick used when using the name "Paradigm" in relation to Aptera. It takes a leap of the imagination to grasp that taking two Aptera's on a road trip is more efficient than taking one EV of any make or model. Having two vehicles available for use at your destination is a luxury even Bentley owners can assert.
But what really excites me is how such family caravans might actually adapt the Aptera in the future.
Presumably, there exists a way for one vehicle to invoke a routine for following another vehicle even without full self-driving. For instance, what would be really cool is a 'follow me' app that empowers a driverless Aptera to follow a specific distance behind, for example, a key fob. Yes, I can imagine an owner with this follow me app, slipping their key fob in their pocket as they walk along the empty beach followed by their driverless Aptera which creeps behind the fob five feet, following the owner like a dutiful dog.
Now, slip that key-fob in a special holder on the back of the 'lead' Aptera and the second Aptera, electronically tethered to the first, follows five feet behind the first ... and so on, up to a four or five Aptera caravan. Yes, a caravan with five Apteras would travel from coast-to-coast carrying up to ten people safer and with less aggregate energy expenditure (and greater payload) than a single ten-passenger Van.
Indeed, I wonder if the configuration of two, three, four and five Aptera's in caravan mode might not be more efficient overall than a single Aptera traveling through the same space. If so, and if this follow me technology were an available option, one might see such caravans of Aptera's running down the freeways, the drivers enjoying full self-driving in caravan mode.
I know this sounds far-fetched but do know that the Aptera, with its inherent ability to act as a radio-controlled vehicle through torque vectoring, is technically, quite close to being able to pull off such a stunt. There would need to be some AI written into the follow me app for safety reasons but in general, compared to the typically unbuckled riders in a ten-passenger Van - we've all seen the tragedies when team vans and buses crash - passengers in these 'caravans' would be individually buckled in air-bag restrained formula 1 cockpits with most likely 5-star safety ratings.
If and when the four-seat Aptera makes it debut, you're talking about five of that model accommodating 20 souls in a five Aptera Caravan able to go coast to coast for less 'energy' cost than a even one 10 passenger van.
With this kind of follow-me technology, you can even imagine car-trains of five vehicles forming ad hoc for the daily, lower stress commutes.
There are a lot of obstacles to this idea actually being accepted - state laws about following too-closely are an obvious impediment - but the idea that you can take two Aptera's on a trip for less out-of-pocket fuel cost than any other four or five seat sedan on the market remains.
It's worth noting that for applications like that, it might also make sense to just use a bigger car.
Remember, Aptera is planning a four-wheel 4/5-seater.
For an idea of the efficiency of that...
Two 100 Wh/mi Apteras each with 2 passengers would get 50 Wh/passenger-mi. (Platooned, they might be a bit more efficient than that, but they're already very low drag.)
Lightyear One is targeting 100 Wh/km (WLTP, which is a more gentle cycle than EPA, but that's 161 Wh/mi - quite a bit under the 200 Wh/mi that would match two Apteras) with a full-size sedan - with 4 passengers, you're at 40.2 Wh/passenger-mi. I'd expect an Aptera sedan to be in a similar efficiency ballpark.