A weekly round-up of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird.
The world’s fastest road-legal EV is a horrible little British car from the 1970s
You might know the name Enfield better as Royal Enfield, a British manufacturer of rifles and, later, motorcycles. However, for a brief period during the 1970s, an offshoot also made electric vehicles. They were homely little things, with plastic bodies and feeble eight horsepower powertrains. One just ran the quarter mile in 9.86 seconds, about as fast as a million-dollar Porsche 918 Spyder.
Obviously heavily modified, the wee orange oddball is the brainchild of Jonny Smith, a British motor journalist best-known as a former presenter on Fifth Gear. He calls his beastly little electric machine The Flux Capacitor, and with its dragstrip feat it’s officially just earned the title of the world’s fastest road-legal EV.
Everything about this car is crazy. It has a runty 1.7-metre wheelbase, a pair of twin nine-inch DC motors coupled directly to the wheels, and a set of military-spec batteries of the same kind used in the Super Cobra attack helicopter. Horsepower is somewhere around 800 h.p., and torque about 1,000 foot-pounds. It weighs 850 kilograms, less than a first generation Miata.
Even more terrifying, Smith feels like there’s maybe a little bit more speed to be found by tweaking the gear ratio and getting the motors to spin a little faster at the top end. Talk about your Brexit stage left.
Pokemon Go player drives into police car
If you haven’t heard of the latest mobile gaming craze Pokemon Go, you must have been living under a rock. In a cave. In a remote forest. In North Korea.
If you thought people were distracted by smartphones before, then the latest fad-and/or-plague takes things to an entirely new level. People have been walking into poles, bumping into each other, and wandering out into traffic. It’s ridiculous.
However, nothing’s quite as ridiculous as using a smartphone while driving, and trying to catch imaginary monsters while you’re supposed to be driving is pure, undiluted dumb. Happily, for one Maryland driver, justice was near at hand. So near, in fact, that they drove into it.
Three Baltimore police officers were standing next to their patrol car at night,when an SUV appeared in the distance, and proceeded to drive directly into the back of the cruiser. Oops. The unnamed driver, apparently unharmed by the low-speed collision, got out of the car, phone in hand, and apologized for being distracted.
Baltimore police subsequently issued a warning to both drivers and pedestrians to pay more attention to their surroundings. The NHTSA has piled on as well, issuing advice like, “Eyes up, Poke Balls down, people.”
Your humble author doesn’t know much about how Pokemon works, save that you’re supposed to catch these things and collect them, and that as they grow they undergo evolution. Funny, that, as news stories like this probably have Charles Darwin hitting about 7,500 rpm in his grave.
Meet Graham, the human evolved to withstand car crashes
Speaking of evolution, what if human beings adapted as quickly as cars did? With thousands of people killed every year on our roads, would we perhaps change thanks to the pressures of unnatural selection?
Australia’s Transport Accident Commission seems to think so. Known for their shocking, bloodily realistic traffic safety advertisements, TAC recently contacted an artist, a trauma surgeon, and a road safety engineer to come up with what people might look like if we were built to survive crashes.
The result has a massively thick skull, no neck at all, an overpadded torso and built-in airbags. The point of the grotesque rendering is to show how fragile ordinary human beings are, and to remind us to slow down. It’s a clever idea, although now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I ran into this guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas.
The Porsche 911R has appreciated like crazy
Nothing relating to Porsche makes sense anymore. Take a look at the 911R, an enthusiast-special that takes the running gear from the wild GT3 RS and shaves off all the aerodynamics. The result is a limited edition car that is as fast as the racing special, but is more prone to sliding around – it’s also only available with a manual transmission, while the GT3 comes with a dual-clutch gearbox and paddle-shifters.
Originally, the 911R sold for under $200,000, which isn’t cheap. However, because Porsche only built 991 of the things, restricted supply has created insane demand. Currently, in the used market, 911Rs are selling for as much as $1.3 million.
That’s crazy, but maybe there’s some good advice here for the average consumer. If you’re looking at getting a sporty machine, make sure you buy the rarer manual version, even if the self-shifter makes the most sense. It might not be worth millions in the long run, but driver-focused stuff seems to have lasting value.
Watch this space for all the week’s best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to mcaleer.nsnews@gmail.com.
