
Following up on Chris’s post from Wednesday about whether a hybrid can be a performance car (I say yes, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be). I have a modest proposal:
Take a Caterham 7 chassis (see picture above), no drivetrain needed, just the differential.
Bolt an electric motor directly to the diff. Don’t mess around, get something like the starter motor out of an ocean going tug. An electric motor with enough torque and power to send a pound of bacon to the asteroid belt.
Next, to the motor you hook up a couple of high performance capacitors and a couple, maybe four, batteries (the caps are for bursts of power, the batteries are for sustained usage).
Hooked up to the batteries (through a controller, natch) is a diesel-fueled generator; you know, something like a little household generator. Fuel it with bio-diesel, and locate it in the engine bay, just on the other side of the fire wall (centralize the mass boys, always centralize the mass). In front of the gen-set goes the batteries, in front of them, goes the capacitors. Continue Reading…


















