“You can write this down,” said Roger Riedener. “It’s not a lie; it’s true: This is the world’s most efficient high-performance two-seater street-legal vehicle. Period.”
Riedener, 53, CEO of the Peraves company in Winterthur, Switzerland, is standing next to a yellow E-Tracer cabin motorcycle, one of two electric-powered prototypes competing in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize (PIAXP), a multipart contest held at Michigan International Speedway to find vehicles capable of at least 100 miles per gallon.
The X-Prize initially attracted 111 teams and 136 vehicles in its Mainstream, Alternative Side-by-Side, and Alternative Tandem classes, and the inspections and on-track durability and performance tests, conducted by Consumers Union, have been challenging. Now, just seven teams and nine vehicles remain after three tough competition phases. The two yellow Peraves machines are the only remaining entrants in the alternative tandem class, after posting mileage figures of 197.1 and 189.9 miles per gallon/equivalent on July 22 and successfully passing the acceleration, braking and range tests that followed. Their mileage figures lead the entrants in the two other classes by a substantial margin.
Following a verification session in August at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, the X-Prize winners will be announced on September 16 in Washington, D.C. The winner in the alternative tandem class will earn $2.5 million.
The only single-track vehicles in the contest, the E-Tracers use the same slippery Kevlar/carbon fiber monocoque bodies as the company’s $80,000 BMW-powered Monotracers. Their batteries can carry them at least 150 miles at 75 miles an hour, Riedener said.
Peraves has built 26 Monotracers and 100 of the earlier Ecomobiles since Arnold Wagner started the company in the mid-1980s, and that experience shows in the fit, finish, and supercar-like performance of the machines, even though the powerplants break new ground.
Riedener, 53, a Zurich real estate developer, raced cars and motorcycles and owned “four or five” Ecomobiles, including one he converted to electric power over Wagner’s objections. When Wagner handed him the CEO position a year ago, he installed that 136-hp Brusa electric powerplant in a new Monotracer body; that machine is one of the X-Prize entrants. The other, with a 204-hp AC Propulsion motor, has already been sold to an eager early adopter. Peraves plans to build 100 machines next year, at least half electrically powered. Expect the electric version to cost at least $20,000 more than the gas-fed Monotracer. Those high-performance batteries are unavoidably expensive, Riedener said.
The X-Prize isn’t the only competition for Peraves machines this year. DesignWerk, the Swiss firm that designed the Monotracer, has completed a third electric prototype, the ZeroTracer, and entered it in the Zero Race, an 80-day zero-emissions race around the world that leaves Geneva, Switzerland, on Aug. 15.
Though Riedener was invited by BUB Enterprise’s Denis Manning to compete in the Bonneville speed trials in late August, he will be unable to do so this year; he needs to get home to his family and to attend to business. But he fully intends to accept the invitation one day. He figures that the more powerful E-Tracer can reach 200 mph with the right gearing. “I’m gonna be there,” he said, “and I’m gonna let it fly.”
Related Websites:
Peraves Monotracer (and electric E-Tracer)
X-Prize E-Tracer blog
X-Prize competition schedule
X-Prize live page
DesignWerk Zerotracer
Zero Emissions race
