Silicon Valley’s boys will play: The electric X1 car & the Jet-Bug

Ian Wright & his X1

Ian Wright is the latest Silicon Valley scientist who wants to save the earth by making a new kind of car — and boy, is this a car. In this video (click on left), his car, the X1, blows away a Ferrari 360 Spider in a drag race, by such a distance that we laughed out loud. It also beat a Porsche Carrera GT.

The key difference? Wright’s car runs off an electric battery. Read the story, written by Business 2.0’s Michael Copeland, about the New Zealand-born Wright, who earlier designed routers and switches for Digital Equipment and Cisco.

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He’s launched a startup, called Wrightspeed, to custom-make and sell the cars. Interestingly, a year ago, he left work for his Woodside neighbor Martin Eberhard, co-founder of Tesla Motors, a startup that has 70 employees and a major investment from PayPal founder Elon Musk, and which is building a mass-market rival to Wright’s car. Also Menlo Park-based Li-on Cells claims that its technology will double the performance of lithium-ion batteries for about half the cost.

(Don Patrick: SF Chron)

Meanwhile, we’ve got to see this to believe it. Here’s a guy who hooked up a jet to his VW bug, in a story written up by the SF Chron.

The guy explains how he first drivse the car up to about 90 mph, and then fires up the jet:

“[You] hit it W.O.T. (wide-open throttle),” he said, fondly recalling one of his rides. “It’s one of the finest feelings you can have in your life. In the rear view mirror, all you see is light and hear the thunder of the jet. It’s like you’re going down the largest hill you’ve ever been on.”

He said that a jet-boosted run will “pin the speedometer and that’s at 140.” He thinks that when it hits 160 mph — he hasn’t seen that … yet — the car will start lifting off the ground, but “the fun is not necessarily how fast you want to go. The fun is the sound of the thing. Just starting it up, it’s like a (Boeing) 747 landing in your front yard.”

The trouble with this story is that author doesn’t seem to witness the 140-mph trick first-hand (probably wise). But here’s the video that came with the Chron story, which didn’t work for us.