"If I say ‘electric,’ people think ’slow.’ They think electric cars are golf carts," Malcolm Bricklin, chairman and chief executive of Visionary Vehicles, said at the Detroit Auto Show. "What people don’t get is they’re very fast, and they’re real."
Seattle Times writes:
Fisker Automotive and Visionary Vehicles are two companies planning to bring luxurious plug-in sedans to market, proving green doesn’t have to come in an economical package.Take the Fisker Karma. The sports car, unveiled this week at the show, can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 5.8 seconds and can reach a top speed of 125 mph.
But it can also travel 50 miles on pure electric power — using a lithium-ion battery and an electric motor developed for military vehicles — before using its small, four-cylinder gas engine.
The $80,000 Karma is expected to go into production at the end of 2009.
In an interview, Fisker said he wanted to erase the image of green vehicles as awkward and small. "I wanted to make a real statement of how sexy a green car can be," he said. “Otherwise, green cars will never achieve the mass appeal needed to make an environmental difference.”
"We know the system works," said Alan Niedzwiecki, a Fisker director and CEO of Quantum Fuel Systems, an investor in the carmaker. "We’ve had it for four years from a vehicle we did for the Department of Defense. Quantum will make a small number of that ‘jeeplike’ vehicle for the military under a $5 million contract.”
“There is a market for expensive, environmentally friendly vehicles, but that it will be difficult for small manufacturers to do what giants like GM and Toyota have failed at because of cost and technological difficulties,” said Aaron Bragman, an analyst for the consulting firm Global Insight.
GM hopes the Chevy Volt will be available by 2010. Toyota, meanwhile, is not testing its fleet of plug-in hybrids. The maker of Acura heater core might just enter the competition to make it steam some more.