KEY POINTS:
A one-time Dargaville kid whose first car was a 1961 Ford Anglia is the brains behind America's fastest electric super-car.
Ian Wright, 51 and now living in Silicon Valley, has built a "proof of concept car" which can outrace Ferraris and Porsches and can be beaten in what is called the "zero-to-100mph-to-zero" test only by a US$1.4 million Bugatti Veyron.
The prototype vehicle which will be further adapted before commercial production, has been named the X1, after the first aircraft to break the speed of sound, and can get to 100mph (160km/h) in 6.8 seconds.
"It corners faster, stops faster and is quicker around any race track in the country," says Mr Wright.
The X1's top speed of about 180km/h is a long way off the top speeds achieved by cars with petrol motors but Mr Wright says anything faster is just an "accident of their engineering" and not needed for road cars.
The two-seat high-performance X1 has attracted worldwide media attention since Mr Wright unveiled it in November 2005.
It is registered for road use, and after further development a commercial model should be ready in about two years for US$150,000 ($205,000).
It is a long way from the sheep farm on the Babylon coast, north of Dargaville, where Mr Wright grew up wanting to become an engineer.
He attended Dargaville High School, then took an engineering course at the Auckland Technical Institute, and designed and built radio stations and recording studios.
Mr Wright shifted to Australia, where he met his wife. He moved to California's Silicon Valley in 1993 to work in electronic engineering.
There, his neighbour Martin Eberhard was building electric sports cars and Wright was invited into the company to help devise a business plan and raise money.
His next step, a year later, was his own company, Wrightspeed.
He spent nine months developing the X1 in his home workshop, working on the car 10 hours a day, seven days a week.
He assembled the components in what he calls a system engineering project where "everything counts".
And he had design input into the development of a battery system which optimises power-to-weight-ratio, coming up with a 220kg battery producing 750 horsepower.
He envisages making up to 1000 cars a year, and sees a ready market in Silicon Valley's venture capitalists.
"There are a lot of people in the US with a lot of money, and a surprising number spend a lot on high-performance sport cars."
Mr Wright said other companies developing and building electric cars were focused on the cheap end of the market, which he considered a waste of time.
"You can't make cheap economic electric cars. They would cost about $40,000 more than, say, a new Toyota Corolla and people would not recover the extra expense."
He says America has small fuel-efficient petrol-driven cars, but they are far less popular than the large "gas-guzzlers", which he says account for 84 per cent of the nation's petrol consumption.
He believes it makes sense to try to displace these high-fuel-use vehicles with high-power electric vehicles.
"It's crazy to burn oil for personal transportation like there's no tomorrow."
THE RACY X1
* 0-160km/h in 6.8s
* 0-160km/h-0 in 11.2s
