 George Clooney grins as he stands beside one of the coolest cars in Hollywood. His new ride is quick, swift, agile, and it doesn't burn a drop of gasoline. Clooney's high-performance Tango 600 is electric, and it's the very first car of its kind to be sold by Commuter Cars of Spokane, Washington.
Clooney advocates intelligent transportation choices as an alternative to securing foreign oil interests through military action. During one interview he even suggested that we, "Don't kill people. Drive electric cars." -- a position often ridiculed by those ignorant of today's emerging electric vehicle  technologies.
Clooney may have the last laugh as he proves the viability of electric cars in a car that can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds and do a quarter mile in 12 seconds... beating most sports cars in the process. Top speed is around 150 mph if anyone can find a place to go that fast!
Speed needs control, and the patented vehicle design uses the battery pack as ballast to maintain excellent cornering stability despite the narrow width, and a race-certified roll cage protects the driver and passenger in the event of a mishap.
According to Commuter Cars Corporation, the Tango "... is a glimpse into the future of commuting. Lane doubling, lane splitting, and perpendicular parking will become commonplace."
Getting back to the more typical drive to work, consumers may be interested in the vehicle's range. Although the Tango can be built with a fuel cell or internal combustion engine, conventional lead-acid batteries work well for most commuters. 
Its 80-mile range is nearly 4 times the distance the average commuter travels per day. With high-tech batteries, range could exceed 150 miles per charge.
To minimize any day time inconvenience, the Tango's on-board charger is designed to charge to 80% in under 10 minutes if 400 amp AC service is available at a nearby charging station. This gives approximately 50 additional miles of range per quick-charge. Typically one would just plug in each night to a dryer outlet and get a complete charge in less than 3 hours and be ready for work the next morning.
Commuter Cars Corporation is run by Tango designer Rick Woodbury and his son Bryan. Their interest in alternative personal transportation goes back to the 1970s when Rick was researching hydrogen power. In the late 1990s, Rick and Bryan realized that the heavy weight of the hydrogen fuel cell and hydride storage could be used to give a significant stability advantage to a small narrow vehicle, allowing a single design to tackle the twin problems of pollution and congestion.
Over the next five years, the Woodburys worked on their design while they waited for fuel cell technology to catch up with their vision. "Then we realized that modern lead acid battery technology could deliver four times the range of the average daily commute. That gave us the level of performance we required to build a practical commuter vehicle," explains Rick. "We built our first running prototype in 1998 and we've been refining the design ever since."
A deal between automotive technology specialist Prodrive and Commuter Cars Corporation (CCC) of Spokane, Washington will see the Banbury-based company managing the construction of up to 100 radical new electric commuter vehicles every year. Prodrive has worked with CCC to take the Tango vehicle design from its prototype form and engineer it for efficient low volume production. It will use its extensive automotive technology and motorsport construction experience to manage the production of the Tango from its site in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK.
Commuter Cars Corporation has chosen a route to production as radical as its vehicle design. Rather than going to the risk and expense of designing, tooling and testing for high volume production straight away, it chose to enter the market with a low-volume, high performance version of the vehicle built using motorsport technologies. Sales of the Tango 600 will be used to support the ongoing development of lower cost mass-produced versions of the car.
"Prodrive is one very few organizations worldwide that could actually do what we have done with the Tango," says Geoff Bye, Prodrive project manager for the CCC project. "In less than three months we've been able to take the prototype vehicle, make over 100 engineering changes to ensure it is suitable for low volume manufacture, and make use of both racing car and passenger vehicle manufacturing capabilities to put it into production."
Cheers to George Clooney for driving electric and to Commuter Cars and Prodrive for building the Tango T600 - an electric muscle car destined to shake up the establishment.
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Wednesday, September 08, 2010 
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