Powering cars with solar energy with Steve Fambro of Aptera Motors (2023)

Hey everyone, our team is taking a bit of a break this week. We'll be back shortly with a bunch of new episodes of how I built this and how I built this lab, but in the meantime, we thought we'd bring you this episode about a man who founded a company that is designing and manufacturing a solar powered car. This episode first ran in August of last year. It's a really fascinating story, so if you missed it, stick around, you're gonna want to hear this one for sure. And on with the show. 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 50 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.

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