Anyone who is following Aptera’s resurrection as an EV maker will tell you it is strangely close to Tesla. The central screen in the Model 3 and Model Y is the most visible evidence, but the solar trike also uses and defends the North American Charging Standard (NACS). However, some other elements show Aptera got too inspired by Tesla, repeating even some mistakes the larger EV maker made: the steering yoke and the gear selector.
A new video released by Aptera shows the Gamma prototype being driven by two Aptera team members: Quincy Hilla and Chris McCammon. The content specialist is the one driving the solar trike, and it is also his task to present and defend the yoke, which he praises for more visibility. Basically, it seems that Aptera chose a yoke because of the two screens right behind it. They present the images generated by the external rear-view mirrors.
Aware of the critics Tesla got for its steering yoke in the Model S Plaid fast, McCammon and Hilla try to present it as a hybrid, something that feels different than other yokes. For McCammon, the lower rim would make it work like half a wheel. A full one would prevent criticism. As for the cameras, they could be placed where the driver usually searches for these images: close to the A-pillars.
The hope that the steering would have less than a whole turn from lock to lock vanished with this video. McCammon steers it 270 degrees instead of the 360 degrees of a full turn to the right, which makes it present 1.5 turns lock-to-lock at the very least. That’s too much for half a steering device. Toyota will have a yoke on the bZ4X, but a steer-by-wire system will limit its turning to 150 degrees. If you keep both hands on each extreme of the yoke, your arms will never cross each other.
Another “innovation” that the refreshed Model S brought was eliminating the stalks. If you want to select gears, you have to go to the central screen to do that. That was slammed as an ergonomic risk, too distracting for daily driving. The Aptera video said the solar trike would follow the same idea. On top of that, the solar trike also lacks the right stalk (some images show a lever on the left side). The startup may argue that all those measures helped the Aptera be lighter, but what if the central screen suffers any glitch? There is no redundancy to keep the trike moving.
As groundbreaking as the Aptera intends to be, those aspects are just a repetition of what another EV maker already did. If they were widely accepted or so good that other companies were willing to do the same, that would be one thing, but it is right the opposite: Tesla’s controversial moves were almost unanimously bashed. It is a pity that Aptera is willing to take the same heat with its very first product.
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