ZAP Hires Lotus for Electric Vehicle Study

February 1, 2007 – Vol.11 No.45

ZAP HIRES LOTUS FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLE FEASIBILITY STUDY.

If there was an award for the Most Tenacious Green Vehicle Marketer it would have to go to ZAP of Santa Rosa, California. Since its incorporation in 1994 ZAP (Zero Air Pollution) has done everything under the Sun to bring electric and/or clean vehicles to drivers around the world.

ZAP has built and sold electric bicycles and scooters, has marketed neighborhood electric vehicles, has brought three-wheeled electric cars to the US from China, has been instrumental in bringing DaimlerChrysler smart cars to the US (more than 300 sold), has sold electric sea scooters and was an agent for proposed flying cars. The company even survived the misery of bankruptcy.

Now the company may be stepping to greater heights. ZAP has signed on Lotus Engineering to undertake engineering and feasibility studies for a number of electric vehicles.

Lotus is one of the best in world in engineering high performance vehicles and is no stranger to electric drive: Lotus provides the platform for the all-electric Tesla Roadster and is building the first batch of cars. Three hundred Teslas have been sold to date, a sales figure that ZAP is certainly monitoring.

Indirectly ZAP should eventually benefit from the work Lotus Engineering is doing with Obvio! cars from Brazil. Lotus is developing the microsports cars - the 828 and 012 - that will be able to run on gasoline, bioethanol or natural gas initially, with electric drive later on. ZAP is the exclusive North American distributor for Obvio! and thinks it can sell 50,000 cars per year.

But Obvio! cars are only a start. Now ZAP would like see Lotus’s all-aluminum APX (Aluminum Performance Crossover) technical demonstrator vehicle turned into the ZAP-X Crossover Electric Car. The tech specs include wheel hub motors on all four corners for 644 horsepower total and four wheel drive, top speed of 155 miles per hour, 350 mile range, and recharging in 10 minutes, ZAP says.

ZAP will be showing the APX (gas version) at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Exhibition February 3-6, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Lotus Engineering, at its technical centers in the UK, the US and Malaysia, will look into all aspects of building electric vehicles for ZAP including electric drive integration, batteries and charging systems along with design, marketing and manufacturing considerations.

Visit ZAP at http://www.zapworld.com/ and Lotus at http://www.grouplotus.com/