This car is pretty exciting. Borne out of the British love of all things sleek and fast and out of the new sense of environmental duty is this electric sports car designed and built by the Lightning Car Company in England.
The design of the car is stunning, with flowing lines that wouldn’t look out of place on an Aston Martin, but with a slightly more futuristic feel, mainly on the rear of the car. But looks are only a small part of this machine’s draw.
Only the second electric supercar to have been built, the first being Telsa’s delightful Electric Roadsters, the Lightning breaks automative convention to match it’s gasoline powered counterparts. The main problem with electric motors is they simply just don’t have as much get-up-and-go as petrol ones. the Lightning tackles this in a unique way. Rather than burden a single engine with moving the mechanics in the car and the car itself, each wheel has it’s own motor, removing unnecessary mechanics and providing much more power than would usually be available from a single engined vehicle. Plus, the lack of an engine reduces the components that can go wrong, essentially making a maintenance-free motor.
The Lightning Car Company explain:
Hi-Pa Drive™ from PML Flightlink Ltd. is a revolution in motor technology and it’s a British innovation to boot! With its integrated motor and drive electronics in one single unit it produces an ultra high power density - up to 20 times more than conventional systems.
The compact, energy-efficient, electric wheel motors produce unrivalled levels of torque with internal heavy-duty tapered roller bearings that can withstand heavy radial loads for robust use. Yet they achieve the power to weight ratio important for the performance sports car capability of the Lightning.
Other features include total weather proofing, total energy transfer and several levels of redundancy, so any single failure will not prevent the vehicle from operating safely.
The car claims to out accelerate a Porsche and has a top speed of somewhere in the region of 130mph. Who said that going green meant the end of fun motoring?
July 28th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Though it does look like the Lightning is an Aston Martin on 240volts, (perhaps they should call it the AC Cobra, get it?) I love it, and that from someone who thinks VW campers are the wasps nads! When they finally make them, I can’t wait to see one silently buzz by the bustop with a 50 something balding nerk behind the wheel, coz lets face it, that’s the closest I’ll get to one unless I find a sugar mommy!