Let me say up front that the Aptera totally rocks. The super fuel-efficient vehicle is so awesomely cool — the hybrid gas-electric vehicle gets up to 300 miles per gallon — that it makes me proud to be an American. (Detroit, watch out, the company that designed the vehicle is based… where else… in Carlsbad, Calif.)
The designers are pricing the all-electric vehicle at $26,900 and the plug-in hybrid at $29,000. That’s more expensive than a Prius, but with gasoline selling at $4 a gallon, you can save some serious coin with this bad boy. I would be amazed if this vehicle doesn’t make big inroads into the marketplace.
I first saw the vehicle profiled last night on NBC News. Then this morning the blogger “Not Ed Risse” posted a comment linking to the Aptera website, along with a triumphal note aimed at the real Ed Risse: “300 miles to the gallon! Autonomobility is here to stay. Deal with it.”
On the philosophical spectrum, I reside somewhere between Not Ed Risse and the real Ed Risse. I have confidence in America’s creative genius. Now that energy prices have risen to a new, higher plateau, we will find ways to both conserve and produce energy in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. While I do perceive a risk of civilizational collapse due to the unsustainable consumption of energy, I’m pretty confident that our market-based economy will be able to muddle through.
But it’s premature to high-five each other over the end of the automobility crisis. Permit me to touch upon a couple of issues:
- The Aptera doesn’t touch the problem of traffic congestion. Take ten million SUVs off the road and replace them with Apteras, and you still have ten millions vehicles on the road, jockeying for scarce roadway capacity and requiring parking spaces.
- Widespread adoption of the Aptera and comparable vehicles will accelerate the collapse of our highway funding system based on the gasoline tax. Let’s estimate the impact on tax revenues… 300 miles to the gallon vs. 15 miles to the gallon. You do the math. If we don’t pay for roads with a gasoline tax, how will we pay for them?
- Dysfunctional human settlement patterns are not rendered miraculously functional by low fuel costs. The Aptera will cut down the gasoline bill and reduce pollution — two very good things — but it won’t reduce time spent commuting or reduce the cost of providing public services to inefficient patterns of development.
So, let us salute the creators of the Aptera and praise American ingenuity. Let us hope that Aptera goes mainstream, inspires imitators and weens millions of Americans from their big cars. But let’s not forget the many other costs — few of them so easily addressed — associated with automobility.
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