Welcome back, everyone. Happy to have Aptera Motors Corp, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol SEV. It's a solar mobility company driven by a mission to advance the future of efficient transportation, and its flagship vehicle is conceived to be a paradigm-shifting solar electric vehicle that leverages breakthroughs in aerodynamics, material science, and solar technology to pursue new levels of efficiency. Today, we'll be speaking with CFO, Tom DaPolito, and we have Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Anthony, and VP of Finance, Blake Ryan. We're going to first start with a video. Roll it.
You know, it's really a shame that today's transportation industry is so inefficient. You put gasoline in a vehicle, you burn it, and only about 25% of the energy actually turns into motion. The rest is wasted in heat and emissions. Then you lose another 60% of that energy just pushing air out of the way at highway speeds.
When we first started the company, we were running computer simulations, looking at the shape of different vehicles and calculating the energy losses. It led us to a profound question: What would it look like if you made aerodynamic drag go to zero or close to it?
That question led us to build Aptera. We reimagined what a vehicle could be. With a focus on first principles engineering, we designed something ultra-aerodynamic and incredibly lightweight, so almost all the energy goes into moving you forward. It's designed to be the most efficient vehicle you can buy. Aptera's designed to go up to 400 mi on a single charge with a battery pack significantly smaller than other EVs. The crazy part, it's so efficient that solar actually makes sense to integrate onto the vehicle. With built-in Aptera solar panels, we think you can cover most of your daily driving needs just with the power you receive from the sun.
In sunny regions, our solar technology will cover daily commutes without ever needing to plug in. You can park your Aptera at work, and you might return to more range than you left with. That's real freedom. No gas stations, no charging stops, no worries about rising energy costs. In some locations, we believe the vehicle can generate over 10,000 mi per year of free driving. Our solar technology gives you the freedom of mobility, the freedom to go off-grid for an entire week and head home with more charge than you started with.
Everything we've done on this vehicle, the aerodynamics, the lightweight composites, the custom low-voltage systems, is all about using energy in the most efficient way possible.
On a road trip, you don't have to wait for the sun. Since we're an EV, we expect you to be able to charge from zero to full in about an hour using the North American Charging Standard. Since we use roughly 1/3 of the energy of a traditional EV, you also pay about 1/3 as much in the rare instances when you do need to plug in.
Safety is very important to us, too. Aptera's body will be constructed with materials more similar to a Formula One car than traditional automotive. Strong carbon fiber composites paired with metallic elements to enhance rigidity. We will have frontal crumple zones, a steel roll cage over the occupants, and our body structure is made of only six key structural parts, compared to hundreds of parts in a steel or aluminum vehicle. Because there are fewer parts, we will be lighter weight and much simpler to build to scale.
I love it when people see our validation vehicles on the road. They can't help but to ask what it is. Then you tell them how far it goes, how it charges itself, and their minds are blown. The best part is driving Aptera feels completely natural. It's smooth, it's responsive, it's quiet, just like a great EV should be. You've got plenty of headroom and legroom and a panoramic windshield. It's got everything you'd expect from a modern vehicle.
For me, the goal is simple. I want my kids to grow up never knowing what it's like to pump gas. I want them to live in a world where clean transportation is normal and affordable for everyone.
At Aptera, we're building a future where every journey is powered by the sun.
We hope that was a great intro for everyone, and we're happy to be presenting at this Emerging Growth Conference. We've got a few slides to share with you here, and then we'll jump into questions. I see there's a lot of them, so we'll try to get through the slides quickly. Aptera is driven to build a future where every journey is powered by the sun. Modern transportation, we see, is dirty. Looking out on the road outside of our conference room here and seeing sEVs and sedans drive by.
What most people don't realize is they use about 70% of their fuel just pushing air out of the way at highway speeds. They're also terribly inefficient when it comes to burning petroleum. You only get about 25% of the energy out of the fuel you burn. We really see Aptera as a solution A vehicle brand focused on efficiency and range, starting with aerodynamics. It's why this vehicle looks so different. We try to take aerodynamic drag down to zero. Add a lightweight composite structure, lightweight chassis, super efficient powertrain, you end up with something that gets around 350 mi/ gallon equivalent.
When you're so efficient, it dramatically changes how you think about your vehicle, your profit model as a company, and how you can really impact the world. The first thing that we've done is integrated solar into our vehicle. Because we use a quarter of the energy per mile as the average EV, with a very small solar package on top of our hood, our dashboard, our roof, and our rear tail section, we produce about 800 W of power for the total solar. That can produce about 40 mi of free range for you every day.
At the heart of the Aptera is an EV. It's got a battery pack that can take you 400 mi of range in the standard edition. But every day you leave it outside, every photon that hits the roof gets turned into an electron that charges your battery pack that you can drive on for your daily needs. The average driver drives 30 mi, 31 mi a day. So for the average person, just leaving the Aptera outside means that you just never have to charge it. It really is creating a whole new vehicle category. Self-powered transportation has never existed, and Aptera is bringing it to life.
In a world where energy scarcity is now a real thing, energy anxiety is on every news channel, a vehicle that is self-powered and charges itself on a daily basis and does not tax the grid, it does not require you to stop at a gas pump, is a whole new thing to the world. The impact is pretty astounding. Billions of miles of free driving could be had, billions of less pounds of CO2 in our atmosphere for clean air, and a lot less dependence on foreign oil. To bring this dream to reality, we've assembled a great team. My co-founder, Steve Fambro, helped start a great company here in San Diego called Illumina.
They make DNA synthesizing robots. I had a great legacy in the finance world and have had a successful boat company, and lithium battery company. Tom, who's with us here, has helped several companies scale to become public and get listed, and he was the CFO of Monster and Ricardo. Blake, who's here with us too, helped companies prepare to become public and stay compliant. A recent addition, a guy who's been here almost nine months now, Leon, comes to us from NIO and Tesla.
He helped scale NIO from 100 engineers to, I think they've got thousands now, and they're a major player in the EV space. Tony and Todd have come onto our board of directors. Tony's got a great history with BMW and Audi, and Todd in great manufacturing companies. As a company, we're really mission-driven. We've had the most successful crowdfunding in history, brought almost 20,000 investors into our direct listing on the Nasdaq.
We have got almost 50,000 orders and an incredibly inspired movement that has us with the second most popular YouTube channel of any EV company behind Tesla, and over a 1 million social followers that are very passionate about everything we do. The manufacturing side, we are capital light. We want to get into production with as little CapEx as possible, which is quite a challenge. We are meeting that challenge by having great strategic suppliers across the globe. LG Energy Solution in Korea, Yazaki in Japan, Chery Automotive in China, and great partners in Italy and the U.S. as well.
We have got a California Energy Commission grant for use here in our beautiful shop in San Diego, California. We are actually a little north in Carlsbad. That California Energy Commission grant is a $42 million program, of which we will spend about $21 million. It is a matching grant that is paying to capitalize our solar line and battery line here in our facility. As I mentioned, we are building a category-defining technology, a super efficient EV that gets 40 mi of free solar range up to a day, and it is in an aerodynamic and lightweight package that just has never existed.
An interesting note on our reservations, we actually had people invest during the first 2,000 delivery slots. On average, they invested about $22,000 in the company, and that got them access to the first 2,000 deliveries. We feel our first several years of production capacity is spoken for, and we cannot wait to start delivering these vehicles. Our great partners from across the globe come together to help make this a reality. Maxeon for our solar cells, Roush helped us engineer the door systems, early suspension. HSL has helped us with lighting.
Mitsubishi Chemical is responsible for making the carbon fiber that goes into our fabulous body structure. COS Stampaggio of Italy helps us make our aluminum lightweight chassis. On the manufacturing model, we really set out to design the most efficiently manufactured vehicle, along with it being the most efficient vehicle. That has resulted in a body structure that is only six components. We have got a bottom tub, we have got a top spider, we have got a cowl, we have got a roll hoop, and two body sides.
That is the whole body structure. Every part is human positionable, weighs less than 100 lb, and it is very, very strong. When we last tested our body structure, it actually had the highest roof crush strength of any passenger car on the road. We are able to do this with really capital-efficient tooling. Even in volume to 20,000 a year, we are able to do it in a pretty small space. We have less than 100,000 sq ft here in San Diego, and at rate, we will be able to produce more than 20,000 vehicles a year here.
I will show a little video about our manufacturing floor and our progress here. That was a terrific milestone for us. It was the first production vehicle to drive off of our validation assembly line. It is now off doing different validation tasks as we get closer and closer to production. It was backed up by our amazing team here in San Diego, who has worked very hard to bring these vehicles through this first manufacturing validation process.
We have learned a lot over the last few months as we refine our 14-station assembly line here in San Diego and prepare for higher and higher volumes, hopefully delivering our first vehicle to a customer by the end of the year, then really scaling as we get into 2027. Our first product is focused on efficiency, and we are really using aerodynamics and our energy efficiency as a strategic lever. What most people do not realize is the most expensive part of an electric vehicle is the battery pack. If you can use less energy per mile, you end up with a much smaller battery pack to go the same distance as everybody else.
That is what we have done because we use a quarter of the energy per mile as the average EV. We are able to use a much smaller battery pack. It is much cheaper, and we are still able to sell a vehicle that is very cost-efficient but can still go pretty extreme range. Our standard version goes 400 mi of range, has full solar, which gets you up to 40 mi a day of solar recharge capability. It only comes in at $40,000, which is very competitive with lots of other EVs out there, even though this particular EV has so many extra features to enhance your life.
1/3 of the energy per mile and half the weight, but still a pretty large vehicle. You see this in a parking spot next to a couple of traditional vehicles. This vehicle is not small. It is as wide as most pickup trucks and as long as a Prius. It actually has lots of storage in the back. We have got a tent option where you can sleep in the back of the Aptera, but any Costco run you want to make, helping your friends move, going surfing, mountain biking, you name it, Aptera has got quite a bit of space in the back, and it becomes very useful.
We get a lot of questions on safety because the vehicle does look so unique that we have never really seen anything like it. How does it handle? How safe is it? We actually have a very low center of gravity because the battery is actually in the belly, so the battery is slung really low. The vehicle dynamics are great. Zero to 60 in around five seconds, top speed 100 mi/h . That low center of gravity means very stable driving, which is the first step to safety.
We also have side impact beams, frontal crumple zones, airbags, our retching safety belts, and all the traditional kind of safety feature you would expect in a modern vehicle. The star of the show really is our solar power integration, and it is why we think most of our community has been really inspired by what we are doing. How do you make a vehicle that could be solar-powered? You have got to focus on efficiency first. When you can make something that can make good use of solar power like us, you can get over 10,000 mi a year free driving just from parking out in the sun.
It is over 1,000 mi in the summer. Taking more road trips in the summer is a great idea. It de-stresses the grid, meaning we want more clean, green vehicles on the road. But if you put tens of thousands of them in one city, how do you get the power grid to support that? The Aptera alleviates that need for clean, green transportation without having to plug in. Many drivers will never have to charge their Aptera at some of your locations.
That is a great feature in itself. Never having to worry about plugging them in, never having to spend time at the gas pump. We've created quite an intellectual property portfolio around our solar tech as we've grown. That solar tech has yielded great 3D curved glass. We've been working with different applications, some airport applications that push back totes from getting your aircraft back onto the tarmac, recreation vehicles, and some small EVs. We also think that this platform is extensible to a lot of other uses.
You can imagine a larger Aptera for package delivery, for service vehicles, for maintenance. A lot of fleets want to add electric vehicles to their fleets, but charging them is very difficult. When you get more than 200 electric vehicles on any one property, you have to have the power company run new power lines, and it gets very difficult. But with the Aptera, you can have a lot of them in one parking lot, and they can all be self-charging. If you did need a little extra power, you could charge them just with one 10 extension cord.
The cool thing about using such little energy is you don't have to install a big, expensive EV charger for it. With just an extension cord from your garage, you can recharge the Aptera back about 200 mi overnight. I'll bounce it over to our CFO, Tom, to talk a little bit about our funding and execution strategy, and then we'll jump into questions.
Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Aptera is really unique in the sense that we're primarily a technology and systems integrator, as opposed to a manufacturer like other EV companies you might think of. It allows us to get through a capital plan that's much lower than traditional electric vehicle companies. As you know, we took the company public back in October of last year. Since then, we've raised $17 million in public markets, and we've also raised another $3 million on our equity line of credit. As we look out over the course of the remainder of this year and over the next 12 months or so, we're looking at a $45 million- $50 million plan to bring the vehicle to its first customer deliveries.
We're starting with the validation vehicle build, so the $17 million that we raised in the first quarter is getting us through that validation vehicle build program. That includes the crash testing, durability testing. We've got software integration testing to do. It also helps us kick off low-volume tooling and some manufacturing capability on our floor here in the Carlsbad facility. Again, getting us through first customer deliveries. Then scaling that up to high-volume production, we have a facility capable of that today.
We just need more automated assembly components and sales and service network to put in place. As we think about that over the next, call it 12- 24 months, again, very capital-light, technology integration-type plan that we've got here.
Thanks. Aptera's here to do more with less. We'll jump into questions and hopefully be able to answer a lot of them.
Perfect. Thank you, gentlemen. All right, Chris, let's start with you. The market is obviously tracking your progress toward production, so please share an update on Aptera's progress with validation and your assembly strategy moving forward.
Aptera's exactly where we want to be now. We've gotten our first vehicles off our validation assembly line. They continue to test. They're running around the roads here in Carlsbad, California, and beyond, and it's great to see them hitting the roads every day. We've really got a capital-light operation. We've done great on our funding plan thus far, but we still got to execute through the end of the year and get the capital we need to start buying some of the bigger tools, injection molding, aluminum die-casting tools we need to really take the next steps into production.
Great. So one of Aptera's most unique features is its solar capability. How should investors think about that real-world performance and its impact on the market?
Our solar integration is not just a technical feature. It really is a technological moat that it would be very difficult for anyone else to adopt. A three-wheel architecture, carbon fiber chassis, lightweight components, super efficient drivetrain. It's been our mission to create efficient mobility, and we've really executed on that over the past couple of years. It's kind of like a Formula One team coming together to win a race.
You have to bring the most advanced technologies to bear, then you got to get out and race. That's what we've done. Now we're out testing our solar package in the brilliant summer sun here in Southern California. It's been going really well. You can't imagine a Ford, GM, or Toyota jumping into lightweight vehicle architecture like this, very unique, three-wheel topology, and integrating other technologies like we have over the last three years.
Sure thing. With that said, what do you see as Aptera's biggest differentiators in the market today, especially given the fatigue we're seeing around traditional EV startups?
Yeah. This is a good question. I think Wall Street's starting to understand that we're more than just an EV company. We're really a solar technology company. You can see that kind of bearing out in a couple of the research reports that were initiated on Aptera in the first half of this year. We had Alliance Global Partners come out with a $10 price target on us, and Northland Capital Markets, I think, issued a $5 target and an outperform rating on us. If you read the theses in those research reports, they're not valuing us like a traditional automotive company. They're really valuing our IP and the asset-light business model that I talked about on the capital slide.
Perfect. Can you walk us through your current fundraising efforts and how you are positioned to support this path to production?
Yeah. Again, the capital-light nature of our business has been really helpful. The market hasn't been kind to traditional EV startups lately, so we continue to impress upon folks that that's really the value proposition here in the solar technology. We had a successful round in the first quarter of this year. As I mentioned, we raised $17 million. That was a nice vote of confidence from the market and institutional investors in particular.
Prior to that, we mainly funded the company through retail investment. The capital that was provided is fully funding the validation program that we've got in progress right now. Because we burn a fraction of the cash of a legacy automotive manufacturer, it gets us through some really significant milestones for the validation vehicle builds. We are extremely happy to have a clean cap table, and we are just executing a very disciplined capital strategy as we start to scale the company.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the Launch Edition vehicle and what customers can expect from those initial units?
Yeah. Our Launch Edition vehicle was really an effort to streamline our initial production. We did not want to have a bunch of different options that would have to hit the manufacturing floor and decide between different colors and different drive packages, different ranges, and different solar options. We wanted to put something out that we knew our community would love, and that really is the 400 mi range Aptera with full solar front-wheel drive. That is the most efficient version we can put out. It is still got tremendous range and gives you great value for your money.
As I said, we have almost 50,000 orders for the vehicle. When we first initially were taking orders, we were taking them for all of our four different range packages, 250 mi- 1,000 mi of range, and they had different solar and interior color and exterior color options. We stripped all that away and made it very simple. The first 5,000 vehicles we build, we are striving to build one color, one range, one interior package, and just deliver as many of them as fast as possible. Got a lot of excited fans waiting.
Oh, I am sure. With that, looking at the roadmap ahead, talk about the specific funding requirement to get Aptera into that initial production phase, and how are you leveraging your current facilities to get there?
Yeah. Thanks. As I mentioned before, we are looking at $45 million- $50 million to get ourselves into low-volume production, and we are trying to take a very disciplined approach to that. That is why you see us raising capital in phases. We had a really, as I mentioned before, successful raise in the first quarter of this year. On top of that, we have the $75 million equity line of credit in place. We have only tapped that for $3 million so far. We think we can make better use of that.
What we are really looking to do is phase this out over the course of the next 12 months or so. Between the remaining capacity on the equity line of credit and the ongoing access that we have to public markets, we think we have a lot of options available to us for the liquidity that we need. Again, got the tools and capital structure in place, and we are ready to scale systematically on this.
I will let you close with this. You have built an incredibly passionate community around Aptera. How does that existing reservation base and retail following factor into your business strategy as you approach production?
Our passionate community is really why we are here. We want to make the world a more efficient place and a cleaner place to live, through solar mobility. We think that mission has inspired a lot of people to come support us, not just with reservations, but also with investment dollars, sharing our story, sharing our videos online. It has been an amazing couple of years seeing people react to what an amazing technology that exists in Aptera.
We think we will continue to build our reservation base and our investment community, and deliver these vehicles as quickly as possible. Then I think we will see a whole another ratcheting up of the excitement around our vehicle and how we can impact the planet and the world with our focus on efficiency and solar mobility. Want to add anything to that, Tom?
Great. Any other questions, please reach out ir@aptera.us, or you can reach out to me or Chris or Blake individually.
Okay. Well, thank you.
sEV is a great thing to look at. Every investor gets us closer to bringing solar mobility to life. So we're humbled to be here and excited for everyone here to learn more.
Wonderful. Well, thank you all for your time and great presentation, and we certainly want to follow along with your journey. So please come back again.
Thanks, Ana.
Thanks, Ana.
Bye.
All right, everyone, we will be right back.