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We finally got to drive the Aptera solar electric car

Jameson Dow | Jun 17 2026 - 7:00 am PT

132 Comments

After a very long wait, Aptera’s solar car is finally rolling and ready for journalist drives. So we headed down to San Diego to check out how development is going on this unique solar electric vehicle.

If you’ve been around the EV industry for a while, you’ve probably heard plenty about Aptera.

Based in California in sunny San Diego county, Aptera is a startup hoping to make a hyper-efficient solar electric vehicle.

But it’s been hoping for a long time. A really long time.<br>Advertisement - scroll for more content

In fact, I’ve been driving electric vehicles since 2009, which I’d say is rather early in the technology’s lifespan. And yet, the idea behind Aptera is older even than my involvement in this industry.

The company was founded all the way back in 2005. At least, its original incarnation was. At the time, they were trying to make a 300+ mile per gallon gas-powered vehicle. Then the company folded, restarted, folded again, and restarted again in 2019, with its original founders back at the head.

In this incarnation, Aptera ditched the gas engine and went fully electric, and covered the car with solar cells.

Can solar even work on a car?

Normally, solar cells on a car are a bit of a gimmick. Cars are generally too big, heavy, and inefficient for solar to make a meaningful difference in energy usage.

That’s why experimental solar vehicles, like those you’d see at solar car competitions like the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix (yes, Electrek, that’s us!), really don’t look anything like a car. They’re small, ultralight, use narrow tires, and have big flat surfaces and extreme aerodynamic designs.

That’s why, in order to make solar work on an EV, you really need to rethink what a car is, and how a car looks. Which is what Aptera has done, with a super aerodynamic shape that looks, well, somewhere inbetween those solar racers and what we traditionally think of as a car.

This does mean it’s not quite what you’d expect out of a car. It has two seats rather than four, as the tapered end couldn’t fit more people. It has a very long cargo area, but not a tall one. It has three wheels to reduce aerodynamic disturbance at the rear of the vehicle, and covered front wheel pods for the same reason.

Aptera has one prototype parked pointing directly at the sun to maximize solar, running car systems like HVAC, as a stress test.

And it took a lot of interesting engineering to get to this point, like multiple iterations on a unique suspension design and changes to motors, wiring, wheel pods, the charging system, and so on. All in service of making a car more efficient in ways that “normal” cars never really have to think of.

All that talk about engineering is interesting, and I can (and will, in another article about Aptera’s factory) go on about it forever. But what’s more important is that the car is now in a driveable state, with the first validation prototype completed in March. So since it’s driveable… how about we go for a drive?

The Aptera can charge through solar, or through a NACS port on the rear. Aptera was the first non-Tesla company to announce the use of NACS.

A tour around the Aptera solar EV

We headed down to Aptera’s facility in San Diego county for a chat and a tour (which we’ll be writing up separately), and also to see and drive the newest version of Aptera’s prototype.

The car is still a prototype – some things are still being iterated upon, some suppliers are being switched, and some capabilities aren’t turned on. We didn’t have speakers or regenerative braking, for example, and there’s still a drivetrain tuning issue (specifically at 4mph) and some NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) work to do.

But it runs, has most of the same parts and layout as we’d expect to see out of a finalized version, and gives us a general idea of what the experience and vehicle dynamics will be like. So let’s dive in.

The first thing that greets you (behind the cool butterfly doors) is a relatively small cockpit… and you can see the whole thing in the photo above. There’s plenty of shoulder room, though headroom leaves a bit to be desired (I’m 6′ tall). The seat can be slid forward and backward, and the seat back can be tilted, both with manual controls.

It’s definitely a different seating position than most cars, so if you don’t have a low-slung sportscar (like I do…), it might take a bit of getting used to. The “dead pedal” footrest is a little close if you ask me. The yoke-style steering wheel – which I don’t normally like, but was actually quite satisfied with here – only moves up/down with a manual control, a telescoping wheel would have been nice to offer more positioning options.

Impressive cargo...