'60 Minutes': Venture capital and cars Video

'60 Minutes': Venture capital and cars Video Transcript

>> Ray Lane is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that helped start Google and Amazon. Now, he's investing in three electric car start-ups.

>> When I first started talking about the possibility of investing in automobiles, my partners thought I was crazy. We're not out of the woods yet. I haven't proved I'm not crazy yet.

>> One of his startups is Fisker Motors that's making the Karma, a four-door plug-in hybrid like the Volt, with some added gee-whiz features. This is a solar roof.

>> It's a solar roof. So this will generate electricity. It will not generate enough to drive the battery though, like the engine does.

>> Yeah.

>> It will drive enough electricity, so you can be maybe cool the car while it's in the parking lot.

>> Some of the other start-ups in California are less conventional, like this all-electric. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's an Aptera, due out this Christmas. So this is the Aptera -- wow! Can you open the door?

>> Sure.

>> Can I look in? You got oh -- wings. You know something, it looks like an airplane.

>> A lot of people say that. It's sort of similar to an airplane and that has very, very low drag.

>> Low drag?

>> Low drag, that's right.

>> Did you mean it to be like an airplane?

>> Well, not like an airplane, but we did mean it to be low drag.

>> Does it fly?

>> Maybe if it were fast enough.

>> Why did you make it look so unusual?

>> Well, most cars, when they're going out the highway, about 60 to 70% of the gasoline they use goes -- just to push the air out of the way, because they're designed almost like a furniture, they're boxy and square, aerodynamically speaking.

>> Yeah.

>> And so knowing that we decided to push the least amount of air out of the way possible so that we can get the highest mount for gallop possible. ^M00:01:46 [ Clock ticking ]