Home / Green / World’s Fastest Electric Car: The Detroit Electric SP:01

World’s Fastest Electric Car: The Detroit Electric SP:01

April 8, 2013 by Andrew Greene

You remember the Lotus, don’t you? No, not the lotus eaten by the inhabitants of the island that Odysseus found after his ship had been blown north by Mediterranean winds, nor the lotus that is the Buddhist symbol or purity and spontaneous generation, but rather the Lotus that is the carmaker that has failed to make a profit in many a model year.

While the car-making lotus’s story is one spent in the red, there is no denying that it makes some pretty cool rides made up of some pretty cool parts. In fact, its parts are so cool that many of them have found their way into the Detroit Electric SP:01, which just happens to be the world’s fastest electric car – at least in production. How fast is the car that contains a manual gearbox made by Lotus? Well, its top speed is 155 miles per hour and its zero to 60 is 3.7 seconds. That’s mighty impressive for a thing that runs on battery power.

Tags: EV, Lotus

Now playing the role of grumpy old man in the foothills of Northern California’s Gold Country, Andrew has had a life-long love affair with vehicles of all sorts, from the bicycle he pedaled across the continent in 1991 to the armored personnel carriers he drove in the Army to the bamboo rafts, elephants, motorcycle taxis, ferries and buses he traveled by during the 13 years he lived and worked in South East Asia. Always eager to learn more about how the people of the world get from here to there in their day-today lives, he, a professional journalist, has been covering the vehicle industry for years.