Over 4th of July weekend in New York City, the streets are blissfully quiet, the crowds subside in SOHO, and the whole damn place quiets down to the murmur. You feel like you’re in Berlin for a weekend. You also end up seeing things you normally don’t and for whatever reason, I noticed a lot of Smart cars this weekend parked on the street.

I couldn’t help but think further about the success of Smart car in the US so far, and hopefully what it means for other cars pushing the future of automotive. The Aptera is one I compare directly to the Smart. I do so for a number of reasons:

The Aptera stresses its passenger cage as extra safe, built with the same engineering seen in Formula 1 racing, where cars practically exploding at hi-speeds have an incredible rate of survival for the passenger. The Smart too stresses this fact and has long put themselves to the test through independent crash tests that make their way onto YouTube.

The body shape of the Aptera and the Smart are both quite uncommon to the American consumer, and one that have likely received scorn in major automotive board rooms over the years for their lack of connection to their connection with the American aesthetic. People don’t want to drive alien spaceships, they want to drive mustangs! Thankfully, with gas prices at $4 per gallon, people are starting to look beyond the traditional and seeking cars that are built with intelligent function in mind, rather than just a pretty chassis. That being said, I personally think the Aptera is a work of art from the form perspective as well.

Both cars have nice trunk space considering their size and market that fact. They are two-seaters and nothing more, but are satisfied with that, and instead stress that the trunk space provides the capability to make for a great drive to the beach, or the trip to the grocery store.

Its revolution clearly lies in its tank, where you can plug it up to your everyday 110 outlet. No need for special charging stations that have long been the magic bullet in killing the expansion of electric cars (ah, that sounds great, but there’s no network electric fueling stations!)

The Aptera was started by Steve Fambro, an engineer and entrepreneur from Georgia, my home state, so I have a special place in my heart for this project and I hope we get the chance to lend our thinking to a brand like this in the future. If the Smart has seen success, I’m confident the Aptera can achieve similar results with a release in Urban areas and Hyper driving centers, like Atlanta, across America.