Wrightspeed Inc
“Imagine a superclean driving machine capable of beating a Lamborghini Murcielago, a Porsche Carrera GT, even a Winston Cup car and which gets the equivalent of 170 mpg. I have seen that future.” Back in October 2007, Fortune’s Sue Zesiger Callaway was the only automotive journalist who had driven it.
The X1 prototype is a concept car, and a test platform. It is not a production car, and never will be. It’s a proof-of-concept vehicle that will lead to a production car in the future. You don’t often hear ‘hybrid’ used in the same sentence as heavy duty pickup, but if alt-power New Zealand entrepreneur Ian Wright changed that.
Ian Wright, founder of Wrightspeed built a 1,536-pound, 300-hp electric prototype, the X1, with a 0 to 60 of three seconds. It has a 100-mile range and recharges in under five hours. In sum: insane power and efficiency – no tradeoffs.
Wright, 54, an electrical engineer, was the first person hired at Tesla Motors. (The company’s $98,000 electric sports car, based on a Lotus and considerably slower than Wright’s X1 with a 0 to 60 of about four seconds, is due next spring.) For a year he oversaw engineering and vehicle development, but ultimately his vision of an electric performance car and Tesla’s were too different
Selling Energy Efficiency
“What Tesla had done was so great. They were selling energy efficiency,” Wright said. “What he was doing was the next step: They were selling performance and hoping to displace ten-mile-per-gallon vehicles – supercars first and eventually pickup trucks.”
He may not have been touting efficiency, but that was the principle guiding Wright’s work. With an electric powertrain, the wheels are driven only by an electric motor, so about 85% of the energy it takes to charge the lithium-ion batteries gets to the wheels. In a comparable high-powered internal combustion engine, 85% of the energy is thrown away as heat.
But it’s not the hoontastic goal of having a speedy, battery-driven two-seater that’s driving Wright. That kind of car won’t save the planet. If you want to make a dent in oil dependence and CO2 emissions, you need to target the vehicles that make up the biggest portions of those items. To Wright, that means pickup trucks.
Wright isn’t picking on pickups. The native New Zealander proudly owns a used 1997 Ford F-350 7.3-litre diesel dually Super Duty that he uses to haul lumber, 12,000-pounds at a time, to a saw mill on his property. The truck has 178,000-miles on the odometer. “If you want to do something about oil consumption, you can’t ignore pickup trucks.
The numbers in the U.S. go something like this: 69% of the oil we use is for transportation. 81% of that is highway transportation. Only 9% is air and 5% is marine. Rail doesn’t count for much, only about 2%. If you look (more closely) at highway transportation, about 95% is trucks and high fuel consumption cars.
Wright’s solution to the low fuel economy ratings of pickups is to design a hybrid electric powertrain. The alternative engine technology developed would be licensed or built in cooperation with a third party supplier and sourced to the truck manufacturers during assembly. Hybrid powertrains come in three flavours: parallel, two-mode, and serial.
One-Off
The Wright’s X1 prototype is, sadly, a one-off, so none of us can purchase this slingshot. The good news is that he is hard at work on his first production vehicle, which will be a plug-in series hybrid – electric with a diesel engine fueled by biodiesel to recharge the batteries when needed.
It will be a 50-states-legal sports car capable of doing 0 to 60 in around two seconds. Wright intends to make the production version still racecar-like in design but more practical than the X1’s skeletal form (he promised a sticker under $200,000 and to have it to market in about two years). There’s much more, but Callaway sid she’d only lose her place in line to drive it if she spilt Wright’s beans. She said at the time, “trust me on this: You’ll want one.”
