Marques McCammon, Aptera Motors’s former CMO, contacted AutoblogGreen to set the record straight and sent over the picture you see above (click it to enlarge). It was taken on the last day, McCammon says, adding:
This is what the team really looked like on the day that we closed. … We had been planning to do a group picture for weeks, but we kept postponing it support of investor meetings and strategy sessions. On Friday, when we told the team that we were closing one of the fabricators, suggested that we go through with the picture for old time’s sake.
The car is in the background because several of the engineers requested the opportunity to drive it one more time before it was assigned to the liquidators. The liquidators agreed and after a few hot laps around the building, the team took this picture.
So, what did those destruction videos show? McCammon said they were taken earlier this year when Aptera moved buildings. At the time, it was decided not to take all the bodies with them, and some were slated to be destroyed. In this process, one was dropped off a forklift, McCammon said, and engineers then continued to beat it up while taking pictures and video because they were curious to see what would happen. Some people did get a little silly, Marques admitted, but there was nothing malicious and there was no further use for those three bodies. One was a reject that the composite’s team had done and the others were development vehicles that were obsolete.
How and why did the videos come to light? McCammon wouldn’t speculate much, just to say that Aptera has a lot of loyal followers, people who are passionate about the company. “There are people who care about what we are doing and I think there are folks who are both positive and negative about the company and where we were going with it,” he said. “I don’t know why they would do [post the videos] but when people’s emotions get up, they sometimes do something that defies logic.”
Marques is still proud of what Aptera achieved. He made sure that one example of every generation of Aptera prototype that was built has been saved, all the way back to the very first prototype, and said that he still believes in the company’s goals: “They physics of it are right, the value proposition is right for the way this county is going,” he said. “I hope someone does something with it, whether it’s me or the founders or whoever. If I could find an investor today, I would go and find everyone who worked in that building and put them to work tomorrow. Same mission, different name.”
