This is the Wrightspeed X1, built by Ian Wright (51), the first employee from Tesla Motors. It is a full electric car that can do 0-60mph in about 3 seconds. You wish it could go further than that? Yes, it can go. Future plans are to adopt changes that boost it to about 2seconds for 0-60mph. It’s only a prototype, the manufacturer says it will never be built in its actual form. It has 300 horsepower!!! Yet it is only beaten by the Bugatti Veyron, which has 1001hp. It overpasses any Ferrari/Lamborghini/Porsche on petrol-based fuel. And it consumes the equivalent of 170mpg. Pretty good small consumption for asportscar, don’t you think?
The motor is a 3-phase induction motor (AC), with the highest power/weight ratio system available.
Its range is about 100 miles with only one recharge of the battery.
“What Tesla has done so far is great – they’re selling energy efficiency,” Wright says in an interview with Sue Callaway, from Fortune Magazine. “What we’re doing is the next step: We’re selling performance and hoping to displace ten-mile-per-gallon vehicles – supercars first and eventually pickup trucks.”
Callaway says: “A terribly understated rocker switch between the seats, marked R, N, and F (forward), was my shifter. I pushed F. Silence. I put my right foot onto the accelerator pedal and whoosh! Half a block covered as I blinked. I backed off immediately, and thanks to the engine braking Wright has dialed into the system (which captures regenerative energy), the X1 instantaneously slowed even before I could hit the brakes.” (Fortune Magazine)
The car’s system has an overall efficiency of 85%, being at counter-pole from the regular petrol cars, which have about 20-25% efficiency and 80-85% energy loss.
It is a great idea for a sportscar. I think all sportscars will have this future. Either being something hybrid at first, or entirely electric, it is true as daylight that the future of performance and environment is on something different than on fossil fuel engines.
In our days hydrogen is being used for producing electricity or by directly fueling a car’s engine (temporary step, in my opinion), and electric motors gain more and more torque and power as time passes. They will surely play an important role in humanity’s next step on the road to cleaner and faster movement from one place to another.
Who knows what will be next…?
The vehicle pictured is an Ariel Atom, minus the 245HP or 300HP Honda engine. The only thing Ian Wright did was put an electric motor on the back of it. And of course the speed slowed when Ms. Callaway pulled off of the accelerator – that’s what engine braking does!