To stay a car nut and be able to look environmentalists in the eye, I’m having to switch from being a petrol-head to an electro-head. But – wow! – look what’s available.
I’d like to make a confession this week that potentially jeopardises my ecowarrior status. I hope you can all forgive me, but you see I’m a seriously mad car nut.
Nary a weekend passes where I haven’t tinkered, re-engineered, raced, or polished my current weapon of choice (a highly tuned Subaru STi), much to the chagrin of my wife (and conversely the excitement of my two young boys). I’m sure that this obsession with modifying my car stems from my little-scientist leanings, and while my car was already capable of face-reshaping torque from the factory, I just like to push things to their limits. I’m sure I’m not alone. The club I’m involved with has about 700 members.
However, I’m also seriously mad for my planet, and herein lies the dilemma. Should I wish to continue to feed by petrol-headed-inner-child (I call him Gavin), I’ll need to either re-engineer the earth, or find greener motoring alternatives. The latter is the option I’m considering, so whether you’ll be buying a fleet for your staff, impressing your hippy girlfriend, or just want to get ahead of the curve, I present you the Ben Prendergast Approved Face-Mashing Whips for Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs.
Kicking off is the Tesla Roadster, championed by the Governator himself, with sexy curves and a 0-100 time of around 4 seconds, you can cruise Hollywood Boulevard safe in the knowledge you’re not contributing to LaLa’s smog.
2. The Venturi Fetish
Ahh the French, who create cars as they would a fine Creme Brulee (deliciously sweet innards with a fiery exterior), and who then use names befitting a car that pre-adolescent boys might pin on their wall. Take for example the Venturi Fetish, an all carbon-fiber electirc car with an electric-tuned chassis that places the engine in the back and the heavier batteries in the middle for better weight distribution and presumably handling. And just look at those curves, even the bonnet looks like a map of Tassy, mon amie!
And where one Frenchman treads there’s usually a Brit in tow, most often with a stiff upper c-panel. From the motherland comes the Lightning Electric car, a 313 kilowatt beast with its design origins somewhere between TVR tuscan and Jaguar XLR. You can certainly see that that the Lightning mimics its petrol-fed predecessors, and rightly so given the car will catapult you to a top speed of 250 kmh after dispensing with the first 100 in under four seconds. Hey, what!? I seem to have misplaced my colon back on the M4 good chap!
You’re not likely to lease a fleet of these for your sales team, but perhaps you the CEO might consider a bum-frying race-track monster to ferry the Missus in? I’ve included this because just as the technology of Formula One cars trickle down to the humble sedan, the R10 will attempt the next Lemans race on bio-diesel at the end of the month and as a result we might find that the interim class of green cars come to fruition via the bio-deisel path before their electric cousins.
5. The Zap-X
Which brings us to the ZAP-X. Promising “one of the most advanced electric cars ever developed”, the Californian-based ZAP (Zero Air Pollution) has teamed with Lotus Engineering to produce the ZAP-X. With a range the envy of your great aunts Mazda 121 and a 10-minute charge-time the ZAP-X would be the first electric car to mirror the capabilities of the family sedan (such as on interstate trips).
Should it look anything like the Lotus Exige, I’ll take mine in black, and work on getting some extra batteries in there somewhere …
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