Nissan ESFLOW: Electric Sports Car

Nissan ESFLOW Electric Sports Car

As Tesla has already proved, if you throw enough money at it, employ enough publicists (including self-publicists) and string enough laptop batteries together, you can make an electric sports car.

And, because of the lightness of construct and instant torque of an electric motor, you can make it sprint to 60mph in pretty short shrift. Whether, with all the lard that comes with  thousands of laptop batteries, you can make it go round corners properly…

Which has obviously inspired Nissan to send the LEAF and the 370Z off to conjugate somewhere suitable, with orders to deliver up the resulting oxymoron – an electric sports car – to the Geneva Motor Show.

The result is the Nissan ESFLOW, a 370Z look-alike with a few concepty bits and the running gear from the LEAF (sort of). Built on a bespoke chassis the ESFLOW get a pair of electric motors – one for each rear wheel – and the same lithium-ion batteries as the LEAF.

Nissan claims all this will lead to a sub-5 second 0-60mph and the ability to travel 150 miles on a charge. Which is doubtles what the computer simulation says, but there’s no point having something that does 0-60 in under 5 seconds and then poodling around. The range would – if the car existed in the real world – be substantially less.

Still, it’s nice to see that mainstream makers don’t have to shove electrickery just in beige cars. But why bother with all this? Spend the money wasted on developing pointless electric sports cars on a solution that produces something better than we already have.

Not something inferior in every way that matters.

Update: It struck us after we’d published this article that you might be amused to read Nissan’s musings on the likely buyer for the ESFLOW. Nissan has visions of their archetypal ESFLOW customer, and his life:

Daniel, an ESFLOW owner, works in tech, but lives for the weekend. On Friday night after work, he gets behind the wheels of his ESFLOW which instantly links with his pocket PDA and determines the fastest route to his girlfriend’s home. Finding street side parking is a synch as the ESFLOW’s compact dimensions allow it to slip into the narrowest of spaces. On Saturday he drives to a popular club to exhibit his DJ skills and his friends are impressed by his cool EV sports car.

On Sunday he drives through the mountains for leisure. ESFLOW’s superb weight distribution and unobstructed view ahead enables him to effortlessly nail every apex, every time. His descent from the mountains is more relaxed and he allows the ESFLOW to overrun on the long sweeping curves, turning the potential energy he and the car gained climbing up the gradients back in to electrical energy he can use once he hits the roads around Barcelona.

As his ESFLOW sips energy in its garage Daniel prepares himself for the week ahead, batteries fully recharged.

How badly do you NOT want to know Daniel?

By Cars UK