(calm music plays)
Drag racing is kind of a natural choice for running electric cars.
You can get some really high output batteries and really high output
motors and just push them, push them to the limit as far as you can.
I guess, in the gas car world you think
you're never going to give up that gas, adrenaline side and the more I got
into it, the more incredibly fun of it.
(energetic music plays)
Go, go, go!
(industrial music plays)
This is a prototype build.
This is the first time we've run
a set up like this with four motors, this style battery, this much battery capacity.
This is a whole new world for us in the motorsports area.
So this car is using four of our
PM250 DZR inverters, coupled to four motors that are arranged in two dual stacks.
They can produce about 480 Newton meters each, and run up
to a little over 10,000 RPM.
Currently the motor inverters, each run at 800 volts and can run as much as 700 amps.
So that's 560,000 watts per motor inverter.
If we could run them at maximum power and the highest voltage, that's 2.1 megawatts.
That is a lot of power.
(Tire and engine noises)
And the system that we're running and how we're running it and the battery
pack that we have in it, we're producing well over 1400 horsepower to the wheels.
That's why the car is called the Cobra Jet 1400.
(suspenseful music plays)
Number one advantage of electric technology is instantaneous torque.
It's a whole different challenge to make sure you don't overcome the tire
What we found out early on was that we were smoking the tires immediately.
And that's just because the car wasn't doing exactly what we thought it was.
Everybody sat down and looking at the data and figured out that it was
just putting now more torque than we initially thought in the calibration.
Luckily working with AEM, it's infinitely tuneable to some extent.
And then part of the challenge is, well, then we, in this case, since
we're working off a factory stock chassis, how do you get it all to the tire?
Once you start getting good data, you can start making intelligent
decisions on all the other parts, spring rates and power level and all
the other kind of shock settings.
You need to make an electric car work.
And it's just because of the amount of torque you have so soon.
(epic music plays)
(excited cheering)
We're putting some good times down now so we work on the chassis set up, and then we've got
a lot of data now that the guys can learn how much more power we can put down,
how much more power we can put down when we get down to the track, how to make the car shift better.
We'll just sit down and do the work on it and get ready for the next test.
(high energy tech music plays)
This is probably one of the most sophisticated electric
racecars we've built.
And a lot of that came from the Ford side.
It came from a lot of the partners of AEM, the guys at Cascadia Motion,
and obviously our whole team.
Everybody puts so much time and effort into car. And for the car to come out of the gate,
as strong as it's come out of the gate. We're so proud of everyone.
(Tire screeching)
(rock music plays)
The test that went beyond our expectations.
I think, usually, we don't come out of the box this smoothly.
So, we're pretty proud of that.
Here we are
at yellow seven drag strip, and we just set a new record with the Cobra jet 1400
at 170 miles an hour in the quarter mile.
Uh, and that is not all it has.
Just, it's a wonderful,
horizon to explore, and we're still just scratching the surface
of the things we can do with it.