It doesn’t take a crystal ball or Dr. Strange’s time-jumping to see that the future of the automobile will be saturated in all-electric models in the not-so-distant future. Big car manufacturers like Nissan, BMW, Honda and others are beginning to churn out electric vehicles (EV’s) in greater numbers and a handful of countries are set to ban the sales of gas and diesel powered cars by as early as 2020.
For the motoring enthusiast, this can seem like a dismal future indeed. If you search ‘sporty’ in a thesaurus, EV’s like the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt are nowhere in sight. In fact, even Tesla’s Roadster was met with mediocre reviews when it was introduced in 2008; I remember watching Jeremy Clarkson dismantle the poor thing as a Lotus Elise drove circles around it. Even Elon Musk himself admitted the Roadster was far from a success.
The issues most people found with the Roadster was that the technology just wasn’t there yet. The range, the power, the sheer weight of the car, all pushed consumers back towards their dinosaur-guzzling cousins. Gasoline-blooded drivers sighed in relief, grateful that their louder and faster cars would live to see another day.
However, that ‘other day’ is here. The Roadster is coming back, EV ranges continue to expand with each new model and the new wave of hypercars are found with hybrid engines that produce less carbon dioxide than the Toyota Prius. Formula E, an all-electric racing series based loosely on Formula 1, is growing too. It may be less than 30 years before we start to see electric cars outnumber and even out range the petrol cars we’ve grown up with.
But wait, you say. What if I want burnouts? Wheelies? Gut-twisting torque? These are hardly synonymic with penguins and emissions! Won’t the fun become quiet?
Unlike Dan McLean, we won’t have to sing about the day the music (or in our case, the sports car) died. Enter Jeff Lane of Hancock and Lane Racing. He, with the help of his team and Patrick McCue, have built an electric Camaro that goes in a straight line very quickly.
It’s called the eCOPO Camaro and it’s very blue. ‘COPO’ stands for Central Office Production Order, and unlike the Dodge Demon, which is a dragstrip beast for the road, the COPO isn’t allowed to see civilized life. GM built 69 drag-ready Camaros in 1969 with massive ZL-1 V-8 hearts and they dominated their racing divisions. 1969 was the only year the COPO lived, but GM resurrected the COPO name in 2012 when they took a 5th-generation Camaro and turn it into a dragstrip monster. Since then GM has made 69 Camaro COPO’s every year that are eligible to compete in the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Super Eliminator classes.
The eCOPO idea was pitched by Lane and McCue at the 2017 Performance Racing Industry (PRI) to GM who was all for it. McCue has built a number of electric drag cars with the help of his high school students (like the ‘Shock and Awe’ which goes down in history as the coolest name for a race car ever) and wanted someone with the experience and build expertise Lane has. So, they teamed up with GM to create an all-electric drag racer. The only hiccup was that GM wanted to use their own electric motor so that they could eventually offer the eCOPO as another option in their three car COPO lineup. That’s a key aspect of the eCOPO; it shares the same chassis, transmission and suspension of its COPO brothers and sisters. GM hopes to offer the eCOPO motor as a crate option for someone wanting to try the silent-but-deadly powertrain.
Of course, the eCOPO holds many more batteries than the gas-powered contemporaries. Four battery modules live in the car, with two behind the driver and passenger seats and two in the trunk. Each module holds 48 batteries for a grand total of 192 batteries capable of producing 800 volts. To translate into driver-talk, the eCOPO produces a quietly teeth-chattering 700 horsepower and 600 lb/ft of torque. To translate that into normal people talk, this electric car will pull wheelies.
Lane and company’s biggest tuning challenge is keeping all of that power from spinning the wheels for eternity. The eCOPO must have 9-inch tires according to the race class rules, which can make it especially tricky. Even worse is how electric motors physically work. Time for a very brief science lesson.
In gasoline cars, torque and horsepower increase as the engine revs higher. Many cars, like my Miata, have the most torque available around 3,500 and 4,200 RPM. This means that the tires started experiencing power for a few hundredths of a second before the maximum amount of torque was being applied - as the engine revs from from idle to 3,500 RPM.
Electric motors can use all 100% of their torque the instant your foot touches the ‘zoom’ pedal because there is no ‘revving’ their motors. For Tesla drivers and the occasional free-spirited Leaf owner, this makes traffic lights more enjoyable because you can jump off the line really quickly. For the eCOPO’s crazy torque, it means Lane and the team have to fine-tune how much torque is being sent to the wheels - sort of replicating the bell-curve that is created by gasoline engines - in roughly 6 milliseconds.
Clearly, my career will not be in graph making.
The tuning is done through programming, unlike other dragsters which have spark plugs to clean and intakes to manage. GM is soon to send the eCOPO team a management system that will be able to help the car run more efficiently and report more information to help with tuning.
All of this results in sub-10 second quarter mile runs at around 130 miles per hour...at less than 90 percent power. The process is a delicate balance of physics and efficiency; suspension, tires, motor power and aerodynamics must come together to keep as much power on the road as possible. In my juvenile mind I imagined a big dial somewhere on the dashboard that the driver cranks to ‘100’ and a bunch of red flashing lights come on and instead of engine noise ‘Kickstart My Heart’ erupts from the sound system. I digress.
As with everything battery powered, there is a limit to how many times the eCOPO can tear up a dragstrip. At full charge, the blue beast can do about three runs at max potential before needing a charge. Luckily for the eCOPO, there are a lot of long breaks between races which gives the car plenty of time to top off the batteries. Plug it in after a race and it’ll be ready in 15 to 20 minutes.
The eCOPO is going to be exciting to watch for all gear-heads and electrical fans alike. Like the Porsche 918 and BMW i8, it takes Polar Bear-friendly technologies and couples it with performance. Over the next number of months I bet we will see more and more of this Camaro, and perhaps some competitors who also see the electric wave coming. Who knows how long it’ll be before we have more electric racing divisions? Thanks to Jeff Lane and cars like the eCOPO, I’m actually looking forward to it.