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…

Even though it looks like a warped TVR, the Lightning GT Electric Supercar might prove itself to be a Tesla Roadster on steroids. With 700 horsepower, there will be three models available: a luxury version, a sports version, and an extended range version. The lightweight sports model will run from 0-60 in less than 4 seconds.

The GT will only be available in the UK starting in 2008, but if the company does well you can eventually expect them to make it to the States. At $300,000 though, you might want to stick with the Tesla Roadster for now. Continue Reading…

I’m a huge fan of Tesla Motors (the creators of the electric Roadster supercar,) and it looks like they’re really looking to move forward fast. Tesla plans to open five dealerships this fall located in New York, Florida, Chicago, Southern California and Northern California. The dealerships will be owned by Tesla; they will not be independent like most dealerships.

In addition to this, they will be releasing a sedan named “Whitestar,” that costs half the price of their amazing $89,000 roadster. The Whitestar should start production as early as April of this year. Will Tesla be the start of the electric car revolution? I certainly hope so; I couldn’t think of a better company to lead it. I truly can’t wait to see what Tesla has in store for us next. Continue Reading…

Looks like you’ll have to wait a while to buy the electric supercar by Tesla, the Silicon Valley start-up whom I posted about a while after their Roadster was announced. Not surprisingly, all 100 have sold out, due to be delivered sometime in early 2007. Like I said, I previewed the car before it came out, Click Here to check it out.

The Tesla is said to have been sold for $100,000 each, but CNET reports that was the deposit, the car supposedly costs anywhere from $80,000 to $120,000. It’s not said when the next batch will be sold. A quick refresher: The car gets a 0 to 60 time of only four seconds, while getting the equivalent of 135mpg, and can travel a 250 mile range before recharging.

According to the US government, it costs the average driver 42.5 cents per mile to drive, including depreciation and repair. That’s not cheap, and when you have a performance car, that rate skyrockets. Proposed is a car that costs only about 1 cent per mile to operate, goes 250 miles on one charge, and gets an equivalent of 135 miles per gallon. When you think about this type of car, you think lackluster performance. But you would be wrong. This one goes from 0-60 mph in only 4 seconds…

Tesla Motors, led by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning is a Silicon Valley start-up you may have never heard of, and recently got a $40 million funding by many investors including Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk, Paypal founder and chief executive of space-travel start-up SpaceX. They plan to unveil the roadster on July 20. You can see how much time is left on their countdown timer at their website.

With the release of this, the Venturi Fetish, Wrightspeed’s X-1, and other electric cars, I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend continued or even took off; especially with the backing of investors such as the co-founders of Google. That sort of thing tends to make companies start to follow suit.

There are a lot of benefits involved with electric cars: zero-emissions, instantaneous torque, and extremely low operating cost, not to mention the satisfaction of owning the latest and greatest, but there are a couple downsides to consider as well. Read on… Continue Reading…