We all know that electric vehicles are powerful. Both Tesla and Faraday Future have been teaching us as much over the last five years or so. But now some of the biggest car makers in the world are hopping on the electric bandwagon and trying to make a name for themselves.
Renault’s offering to the electric car market is the Zoe, a small hatchback that looks a lot like a Clio. For supercar enthusiasts, the Zoe has always been a bit “yawn” – but that’s all changed, thanks to the unveiling of a new Zoe concept at this year’s Geneva Motor Show.
According to early reports, the new Zoe is based on both Renault’s small car pedigree, as well as the company’s involvement in Formula One. In what might seem like a rather strange move, they’ve decided to combine the two, giving new life to a stale hatchback line.
The company says that the new Zoe E-Sport will make use of two electric motors, one for the front wheels and one for the back, which together are capable of generating more than 456 bhp and over 640 Nm of torque. To put that in perspective, that’s almost as much power than was generated by the Jaguar XJ220, one of the most powerful cars of the 1990s.
To say that the new Zoe E-Sport will be fast is an understatement. Because electric engines don’t rely on gears (or gear shifts), acceleration is constant. It means that you get peak performance from the engine, no matter how fast the engine is turning. Unlike in a petrol-engined car, there’s no fiddling around with gears to find the acceleration sweet spot.
In practice, this means that the new Zoe E-Sport will theoretically be one of the fastest cars in the world. The two engines working together will propel the vehicle from zero to sixty in just 3.2 seconds. Zero to 130 mph takes just 10 seconds, meaning that the Zoe accelerates faster than a 458 Italia.
Insurance for the car is likely to be reasonable too, given the fact that the car is an electric hatchback, based almost entirely on the old model. Can anybody have a motor policy for any driver? In short, the answer is “yes” meaning that new owners will be able to share their new baby with their mates. In other words, it’ll be one of the only “supercars” on the market where the insurance cost alone won’t bankrupt you.
This new Zoe concept is a yardstick for what motorists can expect from their cars in the years ahead. No longer do you need to be a media mogul or a tech billionaire to have a high-performance car. High performance is something that is coming to all of us, thanks to the transition to electric vehicles. Electric, it seems, is actually a high-performance technology through and through, and there’s no denying that it’s exciting.
The new Zoe has yet to be confirmed by Renault as a real car. But given all of the concept work that has gone into the vehicle, it’s hard to imagine nothing will come of it.