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Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by markvdb on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @03:45PM (#29323264)
Two various tidbits:

- The inventor apparently managed to rescue several jewish people [0] when designing and prototyping for the Wehrmacht in Riga, Latvia.

- This immediately made me think of the little known Volkswagen 1-litre car [1]. Something like that with an electric drivetrain would be close to my ideal car...

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schl%C3%B6r_von_Westhofen...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_1-litre_car

Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by capitainenemo on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @04:03PM (#29323499)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors#Production_plans Aptera seems to have resurrected... similar form.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by sovreign on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @10:10PM (#29326568)
Hope the Aptera safety testing comes back better than these older cars. Aptera and similar aerodynamic, (hopefully) inexpensive cars are really a nice middle ground between hefty Teslas and EV motorcycles.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by iSnow on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @04:26AM (#29328297)
https://sonomotors.com/ - if they make it. I like their solar-augmented car, and it's not terribly expensive. But they need a lot of money to get the production started.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by eliaspro on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @02:48PM (#29334282)
They just IPOed at Nasdaq and raked in €172.5 Million. This should hopefully help them to get a bit further towards production.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by bagels on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @11:03PM (#29326824)
Modern engineering and modern materials. Shouldn't be hard to do better in a crash than something designed before seat belts and crumple zones were implemented in cars.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by capitainenemo on Thursday November 25, 2021 @02:46PM (#29344362)
One warning is they deliberately chose 3 wheels to qualify as motorcycle and thus lower requirements (probably in interests of weight and to allow more innovative technologies - I remember design #1 had issues with wanting to use cameras instead of mirrors for more streamlining, but bikes had to have mirrors too, at least at the time).

But, yeah, overall the design seems good and certainly far better than a typical 3 wheel motorbike.

Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by bserge on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @04:53PM (#29324043)
Yeah, yeah, everyone and their dog in Germany managed to "rescue several Jews" during WW2 according to their own postwar records lol. Nice VW, though.
Re:German car that was super-aerodynamic but impractical by Lev1a on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @09:23PM (#29326319)
> according to their own postwar records

Please actually read the article before making such indiscriminate accusations.

Pertinent part from the article in GP:

"Im letzten Kriegsjahr kehrte Schlör nach Göttingen zurück und wurde hier von der Gestapo verhaftet.

Man warf ihm vor, jüdische Flüchtlinge aus Riga bei sich aufgenommen zu haben. Schlör wurde im Volksgerichtshofgefängnis in Potsdam eingesperrt. Allerdings konnte der Ingenieur nicht verurteilt werden, weil die Haftanstalt am 30. April 1945 von der Roten Armee befreit wurde."

Rough translation:

"In the last of the war Schlör went back to Göttingen was arrested by the Gestapo.

He was accused of sheltering jewish refugees from Riga. He was incarcerated at the peoples' court jail in Potsdam. The engineer couldn't be sentenced since the jail was liberated by the Red Army on the 30th of April 1945."

Since he was actually arrested for this and they were preparing to sentence him, I'm gonna give this guy the benefit of the doubt.