Britain's first electric supercar gets ready to roll

John Vidal, environment editor
The Guardian, Monday 16 March 2009

It is faster out of the blocks than a V12 Ferrari and can do 0-60mph in four seconds. It will go more than 140mph and can be fully charged up over lunch. But the first British electric supercar is not being built by one of the world's great car companies.
It has instead been knocked up in a few months in a Norfolk garage from off-the-shelf parts mostly available on the web.
An A-team of British motorsport engineers was commissioned by Ecotricity wind power company chief Dale Vince last August to "blow the socks off Jeremy Clarkson and smash the stereotype of electric cars".
All have worked for Lotus and between them have developed nearly every car that a generation of petrolheads has swooned over - such as the McLaren F1, Lotus Elan, the Corvette 2R1, the Jaguar XJR15 and the De Lorean. The project leader was director of engineering, and all six problem-solve for the world's top motor sport teams. "The brief was to prove to middle England that electric cars can be quick to develop, beautiful to look at, cheap to run, and run entirely on wind power," said Vince.
The team went on to eBay, and found a second-hand Lotus Exige which they pulled apart. Seven months later, the car, which still has no name, is raised on blocks in the Norfolk garage but is just a few weeks away from full testing.
The consensus is that no large auto company could have developed anything so fast or for the £200,000 budget. "Ford would have taken years and it would have cost millions of pounds," said Ian Doble, project leader.