Car of the Future Boardroom Melodrama

You may never have heard of Aptera, but its exotic, three-wheeled car is widely viewed as the most daring of the new generation of vehicles to come out of California automotive startup culture. Sculpted from composites, aerodynamically designed to have a preposterous low coefficient of drag, it was at one time rumored to get 300 mpg. However, all is potentially not well with its management. Maybe. Possibly. Wired Autotopia recently reported that a boardroom confrontation led to the firing of Aptera’s founders, effectively by the auto-industry expert Paul Wilbur, who had been brought in to run the company.

But wait a minute: Popular Mechanics then reported that those rumors were bogus and that the founders were simply taking a little time off while Aptera awaits a decision on a Department of Energy loan, similar to loans that have been extended to Tesla Motors, Fisker Automotive, Nissan, and Ford (F).

I fear we are headed deep into the canyons of spin here. For example, Steve Fambro, one of Aptera’s founders, told PM:

"I think some people read into this situation a little further than they should have," Fambro says. "Some folks were let go, and since they hadn't seen me around—they put two and two together and made a fairly large and incorrect assumption," he says. "Since I started Aptera, I've had like three or four vacation days. One of them was after receiving a 2008 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in NYC. So I need to take some time, and come back in the beginning of the new year."

Did Wired overthink whatever was/is going on at Aptera? Perhaps. It did engage in some bold meta-speculation regarding the way that high-tech auto startups want to bring cars to market:

[Aptera’s situation] is also a good example of the typical dynamic between the culture of California technology startups and the auto industry. The tech industry is more apt to ship a product early and make improvements down the line. This approach is exemplified by Tesla Motors, which continued to iterate improvements—including an entirely new powertrain—into the 2008 Roadster shortly after entering production. More recently, Tesla has introduced major improvements to the Roadster for what it calls "Roadster 2.0."

The counter to this is the "Detroit" perspective, perhaps best described by Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard when he frequently said the difference between cars and software is it isn’t so easy to recover from a car crash. The auto business historically is much more methodical and risk averse, preferring to make every effort to ensure a car is completely ready for the market before starting production. This perspective often also comes with deeply ingrained views on what must be included to achieve product parity in the market. A small dose of this perspective may prove valuable for EV startups, but too much can be problematic.

It should be pointed out that the author of the Wired story is Darryl Siry, who used to work for Tesla and is an authority on greentech startup culture. Maybe not the most objective person to break news about Aptera and its inner-workings, but still, someone who probably knows where all the bodies are buried.

So what’s going on with Aptera? It wouldn’t make sense for the company to ax its founders if its immediate goal is to secure a DoE loan. The other possibility is that Aptera wants to go to the private capital markets and get some more financing to stay afloat, and that its board figured jettisoning the founders was the best way to make the necessary design modifications to the car to get that to happen. However, it now seems that Aptera is presenting a story that has the company essentially going into hibernation for a while, a sort of split-the-difference explanation that allows the founders to remain in the picture while management figures out how to preserve operating cash. The Los Angeles Times summarizes this perspective.

Throw in a healthy dose of auto startup cattiness and you kind of want to change the channel to whatever Detroit is broadcasting these days.