Hybrid Technologies Building 220+ MPG Supercar With 'Wild' Horsepower: Exclusive First Look

As if the Silicon Valley sportscar darlings at Tesla didn’t have enough competition from the startup pal it just sued and the company that built the world’s cheapest ride, now EV gurus lurking in the hills of North Carolina are well into R&D on a new green supercar.

Is your mouth not watering over the concept designs pictured above? Well, how do two versions of it sound—a gas-electric hybrid entrant for the Automotive X Prize, and an all-electric for (almost) the rest of us? Yeah, we thought so. Best part: A drivable prototype should be ready by September.

Mooresville, N.C.-based Hybrid Technologies offered PM first-look video test drives last year of its electric roadster, Mini Cooper and motorcycle—and the company’s impressive li-ion-powered sedan’s drivetrain led us to vote them an early favorite to win the AXP. Full-scale production, however, has always been the holdup for Hybrid Tech breaking out into Tesla territory. With its still unnamed X Prize entry, however, comes a larger plan to conquer the fuel-efficient market for supercars. And if the exclusive early specs and sketches that we got our hands on serve as any indication, Fisker’s Karma isn’t the new cool kid on the block anymore.

“We’re looking for this car basically to end up mainstream—not just built for a one-and-done,” says project development engineer Ron Cerven. “The X Prize car is going to be the purchasable—obviously a higher-end car, but there might be something else from us in the X Prize.”

Other than to say they wouldn’t necessarily be in the “alternative” class, Cerven declined to comment on any other AXP ideas from Hybrid. But he said this high-end exotic hybrid would retain regenerative breaking, as well as movable aero parts to alter the vehicle’s downforce and drag. Citing an “overwhelming” lack of comfort in today’s supercars, Cerven stressed that design would center around the passenger and drivetrain.

But power under the hood will have to trump a cushy ride: Hybrid Technologies is aiming for a 150- to 180-mi. range per charge from the all-electric model, while the lithium-ion-meets-gas hybrid needs to hit 220 mpg—minimum. And that’s not to mention performance. When we asked Cerven if Hybrid Technologies could hit ZR1-level horsepower equivalent numbers in the mid-600s, he laughed, vaguely adding that we were “way out of the ballpark—it’s gonna be wild.”

Along with nearly every other big-time player in the race for production plug-in cars, Hybrid is gunning for that magic market timetable of late 2009 to the first half of 2010. But suffice it to say, we want a test drive. —Matt Sullivan

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