INZIO has successfully trashed quite a few of the common conceptions of electric cars. If you're a car designer, the performance figures all add up to one thing – Power. Electric sports cars have been a sort of novelty in recent years, with some grunt but not much sustained performance to achieve the "Wow" effect. INZIO is very obviously a very different beast, and a competitive beast.
INZIO is expected to be coming out in 2011, with a price tag of $139,000. For a high-performance sports car, that's actually about average. This car has "classic" written all over it, and could actually be the Mustang of its generation.
The power factor has produced some very interesting statistics. Battery power output is over 40kW, with an upgrade to 96.7kW also available. The electric motor produces 145kW. This is no slot car, and those power figures would be respectable for a racing car. From available publicity, the manufacturer seems to be being a little coy about providing specification details, but to achieve that speed involves a very high level of power to weight efficiency, and let's face it, very good design.
The Green side of INZIO
INZIO doesn't produce emissions. If you want to be strictly tourist/purist about it, the high-power electric engine may generate a carbon footprint, but electricity can be sourced from anywhere these days, so that's a slightly specious way at best of looking at the car as a Green product.
As a matter of fact, the Greenest part of the INZIO concept is that it is very likely to encourage a lot of other car designers to start looking seriously at producing very good quality electric car designs. The seemingly endless struggle to get electric cars on the road in the face of petrol-based primitivism hasn't exactly encouraged innovation over the years, and INZIO has now provided irrefutable proof of high-power viability in electric vehicles.
A watered-down version of INZIO on a conventional frame would make a good family sedan, and probably make a positive difference to car insurance quotes as well, because they'd be very reliable vehicles. Mainstream vehicles don't need this sort of grunt, in fact they could probably make do with about half the performance of this car.
A further very Green aspect of this design is that finally it's looking like electric power for heavy vehicles is a real possibility. That's been a major issue, but this level of grunt could easily drive a range of basic freight vehicles without much difficulty, and it's fairly easy to see how extra power could operate the
big rigs.
At this rate, Li-Ion Motors may be the first car manufacturer to start winning environmental prizes. If so, they've earned them.
