Aptera wants to begin customer deliveries of its electric vehicle called sEV (short for Solar Electric Vehicle) this year and it’s still testing the three-wheeler that promises to deliver as much as 1,000 miles (1,609 km) of range on one charge. The stripped out prototype shown in this official video is actually the first Beta sEV built and it was tested alongside three earlier Alpha prototypes.
Beta just means this version will be sent to various parts supplies for validation, but it’s basically a pre-production prototype that is representative for the finished vehicle that will reach customers. The facility where it will be built is located in Carlsbad, California and Aptera has the ambition of building 20,000 of its three-wheeled solar EVs by the end of 2022.
In this latest video, we get to see the first example in Beta form, although it is completely stripped out - it’s just the body and chassis and all the running gear, but no glass, interior, doors or any components that aren’t strictly necessary for the vehicle to run and drive. That’s all that’s needed for the vehicle to check the vehicle’s handling performance around a track, and it’s actually quite cool to see it all bare like this, with racing seats installed.
And this three-wheeler should be fun around a track. Aptera has said many times that its three-wheeler is very stable, in spite of not having the usual number of wheels, and given its really low weight (just 1,800 pounds / 816 kg), it should be pretty agile too.
Gallery: Aptera Beta Track Test
The company says it has over 15,000 reservations (you can reserve one for $100), with prices starting at $25,900, going all the way up to $50,700 for the top spec model. The base variant will have just 250 miles of range and sprint to sixty in 5.5 seconds motivated by a 100 kW (134 horsepower) electric motor.
It’s also worth noting that the base version won’t have as many solar cells on its body, so it won’t provide as much extra range as the top of the range variant - just 16 miles (25 km) versus 40 miles (76 km). This version will have more power, 150 kW (201 horsepower), slashing the sprint time to 3.5 seconds and increasing the range to the claimed 1,000 miles.
