The Wired blogging staff lamented over the past week that they understand how quickly punching in “Tesla drag race vs” into the YouTube search bar allows you to watch multiple versions of the world-famous brand’s electric cars doing battle with each other. Time after time, the videos depict the instant torque of the EV’s motors doing amazingly well off the line, leaving the squeal of tires ringing loudly in the ears of fans watching the tail lights move very rapidly forward.
It was almost 4 years ago that Chevy unveiled its bed by fully electrifying the monumental and trend-setting pony car in the form of the Camaro. It was back during a SEMA show in Vegas that the company revealed a battery-powered version of the legendary muscle car that was the eCOPO. Here you are prone to enjoy the brute-force benefits of more than 700 horsepower and 600 lb-ft of torque from the two 300-lb-ft torque motor assemblies. They are deftly bolted together and mated to a conventional racing transmission that is sturdy enough to send all the torque to the solid rear axle.
The eCOPO should be good for quarter-mile times that linger in the 9-second range, and as we intently watched here at Chuck Hutton of Memphis over the last year, the engineers were still running their final tests. We understand that putting up a 9.2-second quarter-mile time is amazing for an electric car, but the concept may get some mixed reactions from diehard Camaro fans who have tons of love for a real engine and have long enjoyed the history and legends surrounding the original.
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Russ O’Blenes is the director of performance variants here, and as a proud owner of many big-block models was always in love with the sounds and smells of the power source everyone was long used to. Even though some of those valuable sentiments may be disappearing, it is in exchange for cleaner, more reliable dragsters that will do their part to light up the summer strip. It’s not just that electric motors are quicker, they can also go much longer periods of time between rebuilds than standard internal combustion engines usually do. This new concept uses an 800-volt battery that allows engineers to pump in needed electrons back in much quicker.
Much more testing of the eCOPO is going to be laid down before it is fully race-ready, and we know that the racing community will have its pulse checked as time and many races go on. The eCOPO’s battery is composed of four 200-volt modules: two under the rear seats and two in the trunk. For racing, engineers have surrounded the crash structures and roll cages, and added a battery-management system that will monitor the condition constantly. What was once thought of as very strange and non-traditional is now going to become the norm: we guarantee that the fun, spirit, and all-American festivity of drag racing will still remain the same even with the addition of the purely-electric and earth-friendly power source.
