@neomaxcom Thanks. I was remembering the "boat guy" (Chris?) mentioning very short cure times (I think with UV) in a vid with him & the other co-founder, but this quote seems sufficient: 5 minute cure with 2 cheap molds per team likely means zero time spent waiting.
Yep Chris is the boat guy who was involved with Epic Boats. And also started/is involved in a battery company of some sort. Steve was in the middle east doing some hydroponics thing.
Actually, I viewed three Nathan Armstrong videos and he mentions a 5-minute (300 second) cure time for the body parts in I think part one of Sarah Hardwicks' interview this past April.
This is apparently representative of a some really rapid development of composites for cars that has been attained in the last decade. Progress seems to be continuing and you get the impression the next innovation will come with replacement of fiberglass with woven hemp as the act of weaving the hemp into a mat form reduces the absorption of the expensive resins.
Armstrong suggested all the tests for a hemp body are not complete but the use is a simple substitution ... and the 'preliminary test' the hemp appears stronger. He said he had finished a small panel with woven hemp and one with fiberglass and the one out of hemp was more resistant to deformation and, when pushed to the limit, the hemp folded but the fiberglass snapped.
Edited to add: The real payoff of using hemp is that if you bury the broken parts, they will decompose naturally because of the organic base.
I spent a few years around the fishing/outdoor industry in an earlier incarnation and my experience with boats is dated and shallow. I obviously need to do some more research.
Hopefully your research will include finding the founder interview vid where they mention cure time & you can post the link here, with the time in the vid where they say it.
@neomaxcom I hope someone else can post the vid link & the time of that quote. I'm pretty sure they mentioned it was Ultra Violet resin curing that sped it up.
That's good news about the rapid curing of the composite body parts if it is 300 seconds instead of 300 minutes (5-hours). The molds for boats and other composite items, because of the work in optimizing the production and aerodynamics is the heart of the Aptera's intellectual property.
Aptera DID say they have a rapid-curing system to cut body part production time from hours to seconds. It might have been 300 seconds but still MUCH faster than normal, so that should not slow production. Also consider that those molds are EXTREMELY cheap to make, compared to steel-stamping, so they could make 2 or more sets of molds per worker team, so the workers could go non-stop without waiting for curing.
Toyota seems to be "milking" their "ICE-age" fossil vehicles for maximum profit at the possible expense of humanity's very existence. I suspect they may be able to keep making/selling basically the same old gas Prius right up to the deadline (currently 2035 in California) & in 2035 just stop including the gas engine/tank & add higher-capacity batteries instead.
Churchill, in the difficult period near the end of WWII said:
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11
The point is that we as a people have elected the wrong people who, in some demonstrated cases, don't have a clue. Sometimes we've gotten lucky, other times, not. Usually, we just muddle through.
The understanding is that people, regardless of any label, tend to do business with their friends, which is not necessarily or defacto corrupt. If the politician demands his friends do a great job for the people - bring that bridge in on time and under budget making the politician look good - that system works. But if, on the other hand, the politician is sucking up to the donor and hints the donor can profit even more by cost overruns, delays, destructive cost-cutting and graft ... and he is still favored by the pol not only because of the campaign contributions but cooperation in the pursuit of vindictive payback; then Houston, we have a problem.
The answer, of course, is to elect the right people. The problem is, of course, the propagandists are often just too good ... especially when gifted with virtually unlimited cash.
There are only two "forms of govt." fundamentally, 1. Coercive. 2. Non-coercive, based on reason, rights, individual choice, i.e., a voluntary govt. that must respect an individual's sovereignty, political equality (equal with the POTUS), no nobility.
The present paradigm worldwide is coercive, using violence, threats, fraud. Law is full of right's denying examples. If you object with "I have a right to..." the LEO will laugh in your face and tell you, "Yea, and I have been granted a moral/physical monopoly of violence and a gun to back me up! My gun trumps your rights."
Rarely, a politician gets elected who tries to do a few things that are not approved by the various deep state power clicks. He is warned. If he persists, he gets his brains blown out. If his brother vows to follow him, same solution. I saw it happen.
And it doesn't matter how you vote, it matters who counts the vote.
It will not stop until the people stop asking to be ruled and start boycotting govt. and chose self-rule, locally, by non-violent means. Are you ready?
@don This is not the place for this discussion so I'll be short.
First, I disagree, all forms of government include both the carrot and the stick. What you're advocating is no-government which is counted among those things we've tried in the context of Churchill's quote. It is called chaos and it manifests itself as princes and principalities that are in constant war with their neighbors.
When I was in college I had a comedy tape with a title something like "Tales from down east." One of the bits was based on the premise and had the title "You can't get there from here." I hate it that I lost that tape but you can tell, by the fact I remember the show I last heard sometime in 1977, that it was memorably hilarious.
@neomaxcom I'm sorry you can't conceive of living without a gun to your head. I can. It's the only way I want to live & let live. The "carrot" is personal sovereignty (freedom) and the stick is social non-violent penalties. Lots of small. communities use it. Why? Because rules are essential, so are rights, and no rights exist with rulers. We can/have/are doing better.
When it comes to pressurized vessel storage of hydrogen the estimates of 20 years or more for infrastructure are common. The novel method of combining hydrogen in a solid that can release the gas in copious amounts by shooting it with a laser is new.
Obviously this new technology was curtailed by the government which classified this product as a military secret over the strenuous objections of its inventor.
While the same challenges exist for refining hydrogen, the ability to store it as an inert solid with an efficient way to release it suggests a way around the high-pressure hydrogen storage solution. Presumably a mega-factory making hydrogen disks could be built, if this patent Monro was impressed by, is the real deal.
That said, I feel for the inventors whose invention, had it been commercialized when it was invented, might have been a great boon to Toyota and its hydrogen dreams. Instead, lithium batteries were given time to evolve not only to viability, but with million mile utility, a total remake toward sustainable transportation.
"...I feel for the inventors..." Imagine, Nicola Tesla's alternator was classified by the military. Edison's DC is not feasible over long distances. No grid. Then N.T. says we don't need a grid anyway, he knows how to supply free energy all over the world (which he did say). And secretly, the military classify that also.
My point: Killing ideas by force or threats or fraud is anti-civilization, inhuman, indefensible. It hurts humanity. It's only possible if we let an elite run our lives by giving them our power.
Toyota seems to be headed down the hydrogen route to electrification. The primary purpose of a hydrogen fuel cell being to provide electrons for an electric motor. Many if not most hydrogen powered cars differ from EVs only on the size of the battery, the presence of the fuel cell and hydrogen storage.
In what, to proponents of hydrogen as a fuel is an act against the people by the government, it is the classification of some guys invention which fused hydrogen with another element to form a solid disk that if you shot a laser at the disk - imagine a record player - the result would be the freeing of the hydrogen gas without high pressure tanks capable of holding hydrogen in liquid form. I think it was invented in the mid-2000's but was classified and held as a national secret.
The innovation was that you could sell hydrogen in solid disks at the quickie store from a vending machine. Had this been on the market a decade and a half-ago, the fuel cell with solid hydrogen storage might have been the choice over lithium batteries to attain range.
And while a hydrogen powered Aptera might be in the future, as of late July 2021, Toyota is the undisputed leader in fuel cell technology while everyone still wonders where all the batteries will come from to power the five ton F-350s that require a 200 kw battery to move 150 miles with the dismal efficiency of .75mi/kw.
If the hydrogen problem was solved, some other country would get the tech, use it. The most powerful tech ever invented couldn't be kept secret. The US Empire tried but Russia got it. Russia tried but China got it. China tried but France got it, then India, on and on. Just the knowledge that it had been done broke down the psychological barrier, and that made all the difference.
Whole most of the major manufacturers have committed to converting to BEVs over the next decade, Toyota seems to be entrenched in producing ICE powered vehicles. Maybe they're really just digging their own grave.
Toyota, along with Ford, GM and Volkswagen were the winner of the ICE vehicle game becoming the top world producers of fossil fuel powered cars. When you are king of the hill - the child's game - you resent that clever friend who changes the hill.
Aptera is being led in its production plans by Monro who was something approaching a partner in crime with Demming. What he's come up with is a final assembly operation to pairs components to the composite body, body and electronics in a mini production line that employs 10-30 artisans who can build 10,000 cars a year. Assuming that kind of streamlined production is reproduceable this implies with a workforce of around 500 in fifteen facilities around the country could produce 150000 cars.
That kind of productivity in the final assembly is drawn from my memory of Monro's efforts on the low-production Viper project that was designed to be a profitable low-volume car. It seems that each production line employed about ten people assembled the car using a movable lift that moved the car down the line during assembly, which is done by hand.
Because of the process involved in manufacturing the five composite body parts - a process that is more time intensive than pressed steel panels - I see the panel making speed as a potential bottleneck. If it is like boat production, it will use molds in which the composites and resins are combined and cured and finished in a process that takes, at the least, several hours per form. I'm hoping Aptera has developed ... or is developing ... a more rapid process for fabricating the body parts. Maybe they can rent a mega-press that spits stuff out at multiples per minute.
Assuming that potential bottlenecks in production are resolved sooner than later - Monro is working on that - it is possible that, because of the longevity of the Aptera - in 30 years ten percent of all vehicles on the road - about 30 million cars, will be Aptera.
That will be because the electronics can not only be repaired, but improved, replaced, upgraded and even expanded. In addition, the wind-blind body is, without a cataclysmic wreck, indestructible and, besides, the operating cost of taking you from point A to point B is so low as to be practically free.
Aptera is a revolutionary product because it like a smartphone can run apps.
Toyota and GM were not leaders in EV cars, quite the opposite, but in different ways. GM built the EV1 to fail, to prove EVs were impractical. Toyota built an ICE car with minimal electric assist, to placate the EV demand and slow it down by selling the Prius as a Hybrid EV. It overcharged by about $5000, exploiting the easy adopters and discouraging followers. Brilliant, but not honest. Then it sunk a lot of money/time into hydrogen/cell fuel, a dead end. I have driven Camry V6s for 25 years, would own a Tesla if not for Aptera coming back. As a math wiz I know how to access value. The design is the bowl of cherries on top.
@neomaxcom Thanks. I was remembering the "boat guy" (Chris?) mentioning very short cure times (I think with UV) in a vid with him & the other co-founder, but this quote seems sufficient: 5 minute cure with 2 cheap molds per team likely means zero time spent waiting.
Actually, I viewed three Nathan Armstrong videos and he mentions a 5-minute (300 second) cure time for the body parts in I think part one of Sarah Hardwicks' interview this past April.
This is apparently representative of a some really rapid development of composites for cars that has been attained in the last decade. Progress seems to be continuing and you get the impression the next innovation will come with replacement of fiberglass with woven hemp as the act of weaving the hemp into a mat form reduces the absorption of the expensive resins.
Armstrong suggested all the tests for a hemp body are not complete but the use is a simple substitution ... and the 'preliminary test' the hemp appears stronger. He said he had finished a small panel with woven hemp and one with fiberglass and the one out of hemp was more resistant to deformation and, when pushed to the limit, the hemp folded but the fiberglass snapped.
Edited to add: The real payoff of using hemp is that if you bury the broken parts, they will decompose naturally because of the organic base.
I spent a few years around the fishing/outdoor industry in an earlier incarnation and my experience with boats is dated and shallow. I obviously need to do some more research.
@neomaxcom I hope someone else can post the vid link & the time of that quote. I'm pretty sure they mentioned it was Ultra Violet resin curing that sped it up.
That's good news about the rapid curing of the composite body parts if it is 300 seconds instead of 300 minutes (5-hours). The molds for boats and other composite items, because of the work in optimizing the production and aerodynamics is the heart of the Aptera's intellectual property.
I've always loved that Churchill quote.
Aptera DID say they have a rapid-curing system to cut body part production time from hours to seconds. It might have been 300 seconds but still MUCH faster than normal, so that should not slow production. Also consider that those molds are EXTREMELY cheap to make, compared to steel-stamping, so they could make 2 or more sets of molds per worker team, so the workers could go non-stop without waiting for curing.
Toyota seems to be "milking" their "ICE-age" fossil vehicles for maximum profit at the possible expense of humanity's very existence. I suspect they may be able to keep making/selling basically the same old gas Prius right up to the deadline (currently 2035 in California) & in 2035 just stop including the gas engine/tank & add higher-capacity batteries instead.
Churchill, in the difficult period near the end of WWII said:
The point is that we as a people have elected the wrong people who, in some demonstrated cases, don't have a clue. Sometimes we've gotten lucky, other times, not. Usually, we just muddle through.
The understanding is that people, regardless of any label, tend to do business with their friends, which is not necessarily or defacto corrupt. If the politician demands his friends do a great job for the people - bring that bridge in on time and under budget making the politician look good - that system works. But if, on the other hand, the politician is sucking up to the donor and hints the donor can profit even more by cost overruns, delays, destructive cost-cutting and graft ... and he is still favored by the pol not only because of the campaign contributions but cooperation in the pursuit of vindictive payback; then Houston, we have a problem.
The answer, of course, is to elect the right people. The problem is, of course, the propagandists are often just too good ... especially when gifted with virtually unlimited cash.
I've read of estimated times to engineer and deploy a hydrogen infrastructure in the 15 to 25 year range.
As for me, I'll take a (wingless) bird in hand at any time over two promised H-Toyotae at some unspecifiable time in the future.
Toyota seems to be headed down the hydrogen route to electrification. The primary purpose of a hydrogen fuel cell being to provide electrons for an electric motor. Many if not most hydrogen powered cars differ from EVs only on the size of the battery, the presence of the fuel cell and hydrogen storage.
In what, to proponents of hydrogen as a fuel is an act against the people by the government, it is the classification of some guys invention which fused hydrogen with another element to form a solid disk that if you shot a laser at the disk - imagine a record player - the result would be the freeing of the hydrogen gas without high pressure tanks capable of holding hydrogen in liquid form. I think it was invented in the mid-2000's but was classified and held as a national secret.
The innovation was that you could sell hydrogen in solid disks at the quickie store from a vending machine. Had this been on the market a decade and a half-ago, the fuel cell with solid hydrogen storage might have been the choice over lithium batteries to attain range.
And while a hydrogen powered Aptera might be in the future, as of late July 2021, Toyota is the undisputed leader in fuel cell technology while everyone still wonders where all the batteries will come from to power the five ton F-350s that require a 200 kw battery to move 150 miles with the dismal efficiency of .75mi/kw.
Whole most of the major manufacturers have committed to converting to BEVs over the next decade, Toyota seems to be entrenched in producing ICE powered vehicles. Maybe they're really just digging their own grave.
Very well said neomaxcom, that's why I invested in Aptera.
Toyota, along with Ford, GM and Volkswagen were the winner of the ICE vehicle game becoming the top world producers of fossil fuel powered cars. When you are king of the hill - the child's game - you resent that clever friend who changes the hill.
Aptera is being led in its production plans by Monro who was something approaching a partner in crime with Demming. What he's come up with is a final assembly operation to pairs components to the composite body, body and electronics in a mini production line that employs 10-30 artisans who can build 10,000 cars a year. Assuming that kind of streamlined production is reproduceable this implies with a workforce of around 500 in fifteen facilities around the country could produce 150000 cars.
That kind of productivity in the final assembly is drawn from my memory of Monro's efforts on the low-production Viper project that was designed to be a profitable low-volume car. It seems that each production line employed about ten people assembled the car using a movable lift that moved the car down the line during assembly, which is done by hand.
Because of the process involved in manufacturing the five composite body parts - a process that is more time intensive than pressed steel panels - I see the panel making speed as a potential bottleneck. If it is like boat production, it will use molds in which the composites and resins are combined and cured and finished in a process that takes, at the least, several hours per form. I'm hoping Aptera has developed ... or is developing ... a more rapid process for fabricating the body parts. Maybe they can rent a mega-press that spits stuff out at multiples per minute.
Assuming that potential bottlenecks in production are resolved sooner than later - Monro is working on that - it is possible that, because of the longevity of the Aptera - in 30 years ten percent of all vehicles on the road - about 30 million cars, will be Aptera.
That will be because the electronics can not only be repaired, but improved, replaced, upgraded and even expanded. In addition, the wind-blind body is, without a cataclysmic wreck, indestructible and, besides, the operating cost of taking you from point A to point B is so low as to be practically free.
Aptera is a revolutionary product because it like a smartphone can run apps.
Toyota has long ago fallen in to the same sort of mind set that so mires the US big three automakers. Demming would be appalled.
Toyota and GM were not leaders in EV cars, quite the opposite, but in different ways. GM built the EV1 to fail, to prove EVs were impractical. Toyota built an ICE car with minimal electric assist, to placate the EV demand and slow it down by selling the Prius as a Hybrid EV. It overcharged by about $5000, exploiting the easy adopters and discouraging followers. Brilliant, but not honest. Then it sunk a lot of money/time into hydrogen/cell fuel, a dead end. I have driven Camry V6s for 25 years, would own a Tesla if not for Aptera coming back. As a math wiz I know how to access value. The design is the bowl of cherries on top.