Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So when it comes to cars the internal combustion engine is probably gonna go away over the next fifty years. Every year, electric cars are getting better and going farther.

But you still have to plug them in. So imagine a car that can drive without having to plug it in at all. A car powered by the sun. It's not a new idea, but it's a massively difficult one. In part because you need a lot of energy to power a car. So to solve this problem, a team of engineers in Southern California have designed a solar electric hybrid. It's a car that can travel up to forty miles simply on sunlight.

And the way they've done it is to streamline the design. The car is called the Eptera and it's already available for pre-order. It has three wheels, two seats, and a massive storage area in the back, enough for skis and the surfboard. Steve Fambro is the co-founder, he's been thinking about how to design cars more efficiently for a long time. He actually started his career back in 2005 as an electrical engineer for a San Diego biotech firm called Illumina. And the idea for Eptera. actually came to him while sitting in traffic during his daily commute.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.