Fast electric car from New Zealand Inventor

A car that could save the planet—fast
Silicon Valley's big brains think they can beat Detroit and Tokyo and save the planet - all while doing 0 to 60 faster than almost anything on the road.

By Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer
May 5, 2006: 7:25 PM EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Ian Wright has a car that blows away a Ferrari 360 Spider and a Porsche Carrera GT in drag races, and whose 0-to-60 acceleration time ranks it among the fastest production autos in the world. In fact, it's second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.
The key difference? The Bugatti gets eight miles per gallon. Wright's car? It runs off an electric battery.
Before creating the X1, Ian Wright designed routers and switches for Digital Equipment and Cisco.


The X1 recently challenged -- and beat -- the Ferrari 360 Spyder (in red) at the Infineon Raceway in northern California.
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Wright, a 50-year-old entrepreneur from New Zealand, thinks his electric car, the X1, can soon be made into a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 - a quarter ton of batteries included. He has even launched a startup, called Wrightspeed, to custom-make and sell the cars.
(For a photo gallery of what's under the X1's hood, click here.)
But Wright isn't some quixotic loner. He's part of a growing cluster of engineers, startups, and investors, most of them based in Silicon Valley, that believe they can do what major automakers have failed at for decades: Think beyond the golf cart and deliver an electric vehicle (EV) to the mass market.
Indeed, the race for the new consumer EV has already begun: Just a year ago, Wright was working for his Woodside neighbor Martin Eberhard, co-founder of Tesla Motors, a startup that has 70