This 40-Year-Old Eco Car Is Now The World's Fastest Street Legal EV

If you follow Fifth Gear presenter and motoring journalist Jonny Smith on Twitter, you’ll know he’s spent the last few years cooking up a stupidly fast electric vehicle, using the unlikely starting point of a 1972 Enfield 8000. The 8000 - a complete sales flop in its day - ekes out a 40 mile range and a maximum speed of 50mph from lead acid batteries, but it’s safe to say Jonny’s is a little quicker than that: at Santa Pod last weekend it ran a 9.86sec quarter-mile at 121mph, giving it the title of the world’s fastest street legal EV.

To achieve such Tesla P90D-slaying times, the car - dubbed ‘Flux Capacitor’ by Jonny - has been extensively modified. Those ancient lead acid batteries have made way for the same sort of lithium ion batteries that power a Bell SuperCobra helicopter’s miniguns, sending 400 volts to a pair of nine-inch direct drive motors from Current Racing. Quite a transformation.

The question is, can it go any faster? We dropped Jonny a line, and he told us:

“We think there might be a little grunt left in the little ‘70s city car, predominantly because we can refurbish the motors to rev a tad higher (than 6000rpm) and also play with another diff gear. But, as it stands, I am just hugely proud to bring a forgotten piece of British EV history back from the grave. I hope, in this small way, that the term ‘EV muscle’ can now be justified.”

So yes, there could be more to come. But for now, Jonny is proud to point out that the Flux Capacitor can match a Porsche 918 Spyder on the quarter-mile. Now there’s a race we’d like to see…