The First Mass-Produced Solar Car Is Coming Soon, Sparking Excitement and Uncertainty
Reporter Michaela Haas takes Aptera's Sol car out for a test drive in San Diego, Calif.
The white two-seater car that rolls down the street in the Sorrento Valley of San Diego looks like a futuristic batmobile, with its long aerodynamic tail and curved underbelly. Called 'Sol' (Spanish for "sun"), it runs solely on solar and could be the future of green cars. Its maker, the California startup Aptera, has announced the production of Sol, the world's first mass-produced solar vehicle, by the end of this year. Aptera co-founder Chris Anthony points to the sky as he says, "On this sunny California day, there is ample fuel. You never need to charge the car."
If you live in a sunny state like California or Florida, you might never need to plug in the streamlined Sol because the solar panels recharge while driving and parked. Its 60-mile range is more than the average commuter needs. For cloudy weather, battery packs can be recharged electronically for a range of up to 1,000 miles. The ultra-aerodynamic shape made of lightweight materials such as carbon, Kevlar, and hemp makes the Sol four times more energy-efficient than a Tesla, according to Aptera. "The material is seven times stronger than steel and even survives hail or an angry ex-girlfriend," Anthony promises.
Co-founder Steve Fambro opens the Sol's white doors that fly upwards like wings and I get inside for a test drive. Two dozen square solar panels, each the size of a large square coaster, on the roof, front, and tail power the car. The white interior is spartan; monitors have replaced mirrors and the dashboard. An engineer sits in the driver's seat, hits the pedal, and the low-drag two-seater zooms from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds.
It feels like sitting in a race car because the two-seater is so low to the ground but the car is built to go no faster than 100 or 110 mph. The finished car will weigh less than 1,800 pounds, about half of the smallest Tesla. The average car, by comparison, weighs more than double that. "We've built it primarily for energy efficiency," Steve Fambro says, explaining why the Sol has only three wheels. It's technically an "auto-cycle," a hybrid between a motorcycle and a car, but Aptera's designers are also working to design a four-seater.
There has never been a lack of grand visions for the future of the automobile, but until these solar cars actually hit the streets, nobody knows how the promises will hold up.
Transportation is currently the biggest source of greenhouse gases. Developing an efficient solar car that does not burden the grid has been the dream of innovators for decades. Every other year, dozens of innovators race their self-built solar cars 2,000 miles through the Australian desert.
More effective solar panels are finally making the dream mass-compatible, but just like other innovative car ideas, Aptera's vision has been plagued with money problems. Anthony and Fambro were part of the original crew that founded Aptera in 2006 and worked on the first prototype around the same time Tesla built its first roadster, but Aptera went bankrupt in 2011. Anthony and Fambro left a year before the bankruptcy and went on to start other companies. Among other projects, Fambro developed the first USDA organic vertical farm in the United Arab Emirates, and Anthony built a lithium battery company, before the two decided to buy Aptera back. Without a billionaire such as Elon Musk bankrolling the risky process of establishing a whole new car production system from scratch, the huge production costs are almost insurmountable.
But Aptera's founders believe they have found solutions for the entire production process as well as the car design. Most parts of the Sol's body can be made by 3D printers and assembled like a Lego kit. If this makes you think of a toy car, Anthony assures potential buyers that the car aced stress tests and claims it's safer than any vehicle on the market, "because the interior is shaped like an egg and if there is an impact, the pressure gets distributed equally." However, Aptera has yet to release crash test safety data so outside experts cannot evaluate their claims.
Instead of building a huge production facility, Anthony and Fambro envision "micro-factories," each less than 10,000 square feet, where a small crew can assemble cars on demand wherever the orders are highest, be it in California, Canada, or China.
If a part of the Sol breaks, Aptera promises to send replacement parts to any corner of the world within 24 hours, with instructions. So a mechanic in a rural corner in Arkansas or China who never worked on a solar car before simply needs to download the instructions and replace the broken part. At least that's the idea. "The material does not rust nor fatigue," Fambro promises. "You can pass the car onto your grandchildren. When more efficient solar panels hit the market, we simply replace them."
More than 11,000 potential buyers have already signed up; the cheapest model costs around $26,000 USD and Aptera expects the first cars to ship by the end of the year.
Two other solar carmakers are vying for the pole position in the race to be the first to market: The German startup Sono has also announced it will also produce its first solar car by the end of this year. The price tag for the basic model is also around $26,000, but its concept is very different. From the outside, the Sion looks like a conservative minivan for a family; only a closer look reveals that the dark exterior is made of solar panels. Sono, too, nearly went bankrupt a few years ago and was saved through a crowdfunding campaign by enthusiastic fans.
Meanwhile, Norwegian company Lightyear wants to produce a sleek solar-powered luxury sedan by the end of the year, but its price of around $180,000 makes it unaffordable for most buyers.
There has never been a lack of grand visions for the future of the automobile, but until these solar cars actually hit the streets, nobody knows how the promises will hold up. How often will the cars need to be repaired? What happens when snow and ice cover the solar panels? Also, you can't park the car in a garage if you need the sun to charge it.
Critics, including students at the Solar Car team at the University of Michigan, say that mounting solar panels on a moving vehicle will never yield the most efficient results compared to static panels. Also, they are quick to point out that no company has managed to overcome the production hurdles yet. Others in the field also wonder how well the solar panels will actually work.
"It's important to realize that the solar mileage claims by these companies are likely the theoretical best case scenario but in the real world, solar range will be significantly less when you factor in shading, parking in garages, and geographies with lower solar irradiance," says Evan Stumpges, the team coordinator for the American Solar Challenge, a competition in which enthusiasts build and race solar-powered cars. "The encouraging thing is that I have seen videos of real working prototypes for each of these vehicles which is a key accomplishment. That said, I believe the biggest hurdle these companies have yet to face is successfully ramping up to volume production and understanding what their profitability point will be for selling the vehicles once production has stabilized."
Professor Daniel M. Kammen, the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the world's foremost experts on renewable energy, believes that the technical challenges have been solved, and that solar cars have real advantages over electric vehicles.
"This is the right time to be bullish. Cutting out the charging is a natural solution for long rides," he says. "These vehicles are essentially solar panels and batteries on wheels. These are now record low-cost and can be built from sustainable materials." Apart from Aptera's no-charge technology, he appreciates the move toward no-conflict materials. "Not only is the time ripe but the youth movement is pushing toward conflict-free material and reducing resource waste....A low-cost solar fleet could be really interesting in relieving burden on the grid, or you could easily imagine a city buying a bunch of them and connecting them with mass transit." While he has followed all three new solar companies with interest, he has already ordered an Aptera car for himself, "because it's American and it looks the most different."
After taking a spin in the Sol, it is startling to switch back into a regular four-seater. Rolling out of Aptera's parking lot onto the freeway next to all the oversized gas guzzlers that need to stop every couple of hundreds of miles to fill up, one can't help but think: We've just taken a trip into the future.
Chicken that is grown entirely in a laboratory, without harming a single bird, could be sold in supermarkets in the coming months. But critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat have not been appropriately explored.
Last November, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration disclosed that chicken from a California firm called UPSIDE Foods did not raise safety concerns, it drily upended how humans have obtained animal protein for thousands of generations.
“The FDA is ready to work with additional firms developing cultured animal cell food and production processes to ensure their food is safe and lawful,” the agency said in a statement at the time.
Assuming UPSIDE obtains clearances from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, its chicken – grown entirely in a laboratory without harming a single bird – could be sold in supermarkets in the coming months.
“Ultimately, we want our products to be available everywhere meat is sold, including retail and food service channels,” a company spokesperson said. The upscale French restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco will have UPSIDE chicken on its menu once it is approved, she added.
Known as lab-grown or cultured meat, a product such as UPSIDE’s is created using stem cells and other tissue obtained from a chicken, cow or other livestock. Those cells are then multiplied in a nutrient-dense environment, usually in conjunction with a “scaffold” of plant-based materials or gelatin to give them a familiar form, such as a chicken breast or a ribeye steak. A Dutch company called Mosa Meat claims it can produce 80,000 hamburgers derived from a cluster of tissue the size of a sesame seed.
Critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat and the possibility it could merge “Brave New World” with “The Jungle” and “Soylent Green” have not been appropriately explored.
That’s a far cry from when it took months of work to create the first lab-grown hamburger a decade ago. That minuscule patty – which did not contain any fat and was literally plucked from a Petri dish to go into a frying pan – cost about $325,000 to produce.
Just a decade later, an Israeli company called Future Meat said it can produce lab-grown meat for about $1.70 per pound. It plans to open a production facility in the U.S. sometime in 2023 and distribute its products under the brand name “Believer.”
Costs for production have sunk so low that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh expect sometime in early 2024 to produce lab-grown Wagyu steak to showcase the viability of growing high-end cuts of beef cheaply. The Carnegie Mellon team is producing its Wagyu using a consumer 3-D printer bought secondhand on eBay and modified to print the highly marbled flesh using a method developed by the university. The device costs $200 – about the same as a pound of Wagyu in the U.S. The initiative’s modest five-figure budget was successfully crowdfunded last year.
“The big cost is going to be the cells (which are being extracted by a cow somewhere in Pennsylvania), but otherwise printing doesn’t add much to the process,” said Rosalyn Abbott, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of bioengineering who is co-leader on the project. “But it adds value, unlike doing this with ground meat.”
Lab-Grown Meat’s Promise
Proponents of lab-grown meat say it will cut down on traditional agriculture, which has been a leading contributor to deforestation, water shortages and contaminated waterways from animal waste, as well as climate change.
An Oxford University study from 2011 concludes lab-grown meat could have greenhouse emissions 96 percent lower compared to traditionally raised livestock. Moreover, proponents of lab-grown meat claim that the suffering of animals would decline dramatically, as they would no longer need to be warehoused and slaughtered. A recently opened 26-story high-rise in China dedicated to the raising and slaughtering of pigs illustrates the current plight of livestock in stark terms.
Scientists may even learn how to tweak lab-grown meat to make it more nutritious. Natural red meat is high in saturated fat and, if it’s eaten too often, can lead to chronic diseases. In lab versions, the saturated fat could be swapped for healthier, omega-3 fatty acids.
But critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat and the possibility it could merge “Brave New World” with “The Jungle” and “Soylent Green” have not been appropriately explored.
A Slippery Slope?
Some academics who have studied the moral and ethical issues surrounding lab-grown meat believe it will have a tough path ahead gaining acceptance by consumers. Should it actually succeed in gaining acceptance, many ethical questions must be answered.
“People might be interested” in lab-grown meat, perhaps as a curiosity, said Carlos Alvaro, an associate professor of philosophy at the New York City College of Technology, part of the City University of New York. But the allure of traditionally sourced meat has been baked – or perhaps grilled – into people’s minds for so long that they may not want to make the switch. Plant-based meat provides a recent example of the uphill battle involved in changing old food habits, with Beyond Meat’s stock prices dipping nearly 80 percent in 2022.
"There are many studies showing that people don’t really care about the environment (to that extent)," Alvaro said. "So I don’t know how you would convince people to do this because of the environment.”
“From my research, I understand that the taste (of lab-grown meat) is not quite there,” Alvaro said, noting that the amino acids, sugars and other nutrients required to grow cultivated meat do not mimic what livestock are fed. He also observed that the multiplication of cells as part of the process “really mimic cancer cells” in the way they grow, another off-putting thought for would-be consumers of the product.
Alvaro is also convinced the public will not buy into any argument that lab-grown meat is more environmentally friendly.
“If people care about the environment, they either try and consume considerably less meat and other animal products, or they go vegan or vegetarian,” he said. “But there are many studies showing that people don’t really care about the environment (to that extent). So I don’t know how you would convince people to do this because of the environment.”
Ben Bramble, a professor at Australian National University who previously held posts at Princeton and Trinity College in Ireland, takes a slightly different tack. He noted that “if lab-grown meat becomes cheaper, healthier, or tastier than regular meat, there will be a large market for it. If it becomes all of these things, it will dominate the market.”
However, Bramble has misgivings about that occurring. He believes a smooth transition from traditionally sourced meat to a lab-grown version would allow humans to elide over the decades of animal cruelty perpetrated by large-scale agriculture, without fully reckoning with and learning from this injustice.
“My fear is that if we all switch over to lab-grown meat because it has become cheaper, healthier, or tastier than regular meat, we might never come to realize what we have done, and the terrible things we are capable of,” he said. “This would be a catastrophe.”
Bramble’s writings about cultured meat also raise some serious moral conundrums. If, for example, animal meat may be cultivated without killing animals, why not create products from human protein?
Actually, that’s already happened.
It occurred in 2019, when Orkan Telhan, a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, collaborated with two scientists to create an art exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the future of foodstuffs.
Although the exhibit included bioengineered bread and genetically modified salmon, it was an installation called “Ouroboros Steak” that drew the most attention. That was comprised of pieces of human flesh grown in a lab from cultivated cells and expired blood products obtained from online sources.
The exhibit was presented as four tiny morsels of red meat – shaped in patterns suggesting an ouroboros, a dragon eating its own tail. They were placed in tiny individual saucers atop a larger plate and placemat with a calico pattern, suggesting an item to order in a diner. The artwork drew international headlines – as well as condemnation for Telhan’s vision.
Telhan’s artwork is intended to critique the overarching assumption that lab-grown meat will eventually replace more traditional production methods, as well as the lack of transparency surrounding many processed foodstuffs. “They think that this problem (from industrial-scale agriculture) is going be solved by this new technology,” Telhan said. “I am critical (of) that perspective.”
Unlike Bramble, Telhan is not against lab-grown meat, so long as its producers are transparent about the sourcing of materials and its cultivation. But he believes that large-scale agricultural meat production – which dates back centuries – is not going to be replaced so quickly.
“We see this again and again with different industries, like algae-based fuels. A lot of companies were excited about this, and promoted it,” Telhan said. “And years later, we know these fuels work. But to be able to displace the oil industry means building the infrastructure to scale takes billions of dollars, and nobody has the patience or money to do it.”
Alvaro concurred on this point, which he believes is already weakened because a large swath of consumers aren’t concerned about environmental degradation.
“They’re going to have to sell this big, but in order to convince people to do so, they have to convince them to eat this product instead of regular meat,” Alvaro said.
Hidden Tweaks?
Moreover, if lab-based meat does obtain a significant market share, Telhan suggested companies may do things to the product – such as to genetically modify it to become more profitable – and never notify consumers. That is a particular concern in the U.S., where regulations regarding such modifications are vastly more relaxed than in the European Union.
“I think that they have really good objectives, and they aspire to good objectives,” Telhan said. “But the system itself doesn't really allow for that much transparency.”
No matter what the future holds, sometime next year Carnegie Mellon is expected to hold a press conference announcing it has produced a cut of the world’s most expensive beef with the help of a modified piece of consumer electronics. It will likely take place at around the same time UPSIDE chicken will be available for purchase in supermarkets and restaurants, pending the USDA’s approvals.
Abbott, the Carnegie Mellon professor, suggested the future event will be both informative and celebratory.
“I think Carnegie Mellon would have someone potentially cook it for us,” she said. “Like have a really good chef in New York City do it.”
In this week's Friday Five, breathing this way may cut down on anxiety, a fasting regimen that could make you sick, this type of job makes men more virile, 3D printed hearts could save your life, and the role of metformin in preventing dementia.
The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.
Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five, featuring interviews with Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Dr. Filip Swirski, professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
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Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five, featuring interviews with Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Dr. Filip Swirski, professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
- Breathing this way cuts down on anxiety*
- Could your fasting regimen make you sick?
- This type of job makes men more virile
- 3D printed hearts could save your life
- Yet another potential benefit of metformin
* This video with Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford shows exactly how to do the breathing practice.