Smitty,
They are a lot further along that dreaming. The Aptera was a dream; the Elio is $240M away from hardscrabble reality. Let us not disrespect or let go unacknowledged the positive gains they have made. Real suppliers? Yes. A workable and nearly finalized design? Yes. Initial funding for development? Yes. A good business plan? Yes. A flexible capitalization plan? Maybe but mostly yes. And so on.
I have the luxury of working in an environment where I get to see a lot of early business development ideas (I am not a businessperson per se but a technical specialist that gets involved in due diligence). While many of these are exciting and one or two transformative, I see a lot (A LOT) of whacky, half-baked stuff. The Elio is so much more real that it only seems less so because automotive innovation, such as it is, has characteristically been so expensive and hidebound that it could only happen from within existing organizations. Each existing organization desires only to EXPAND its market share at the expense of rivals, not destroy its market share to build markets where none existed. This has constrained automotive innovation to the point that it is governments that drive it now, primarily through CAFE-like rules designed either to promote safety or efficiency.
In this light the Elio is either a sure bet to happen as is or a sure bet to convince another manufacturer to do something similar. I could easily see, for example, one of the traditional motorcycle companies who doesn't make a three-wheeler, looking at this and thinking 'wow - those guys got surprisingly far'. Making an Elio-like three-wheeler wouldn't likely subvert their two-wheeler market but it would encroach on the car market that a motorcycle manufacturer doesn't currently access.