One of the women that work with my wife, her husband was interviewing for a position at Tesla as an engineer. He decided not to take the job which would have had them move from Michigan to California. That happened about a week before the airplane accident. I am glad he was not a part of that.
However, Tesla is a very interesting forward looking company. As is this electric Fiero.
I was involved as a technical advisor on a few projects with our local community college Delta College in Saginaw, MI for three years. They had some kids who graduated from an inner city school, Arthur Hill High School, that I also advised for their techical programs. The third year of doing projects with Solar and electric cars they built up an electric Fiero. They maintained the 4 speed stick shift and planted lead acid traction batteries all over the car, in the trunk, in the front and around the motor. They used a 90Volt DC system mostly because that was what was available at the time. It worked pretty good, but it was quite heavy because of the lead acid batteries. It was able to reach speeds above 60mph and had a range of about 45 miles if I remember right. This was back in the late 80's early 90's and was very good for freshmen and sophmores in college.
The other group at the high school ended up building several vehicles starting out with Human Powered Vehicles, then transitioned to small electric vehicles and then to solar electric vehicles. The won the national chamionship competition 2 out of three years and came in second on the off year. In their solar car they installed nickel metal hydride batteries, since Li-ion batteries were not availible then.
It would be interesting to get a little more information about the drive train in this electric vehicle, especially the motor. Is it a normal AC induction 3 phase motor or one with a permanent magnet rotor like the brushless DC motors or Servo's. I am guessing the later since you should be able to develop better torque and power from that type of motor.
