The EV Himiko is a retro styled coupe from Japanese auto maker Mitsuoka Motors, which takes a basic running chassis from a Mazda MX-5, mates it to a fancy pants top half and inserts a shed load (i.e. around 168) of Lithium batteries to get a retro roadster capable of running for 550 km between charges.
There’s no word on price as yet, but rest assured it’s not going to be cheap, unless the developers have suddenly come up with a crazy low price for battery packs. Good luck with the insurance premiums too. But looks nice, don’t it? Due out by the middle of next year.
“One of these cases contains 21 cells. Usually, there are 7 or 8 cells per pack, but we’ve saved space by stacking them. When we considered how to make battery packs safe, light, and strong, this was the form we came up with.” “We’ve spent a long time reducing the running resistance of the car, and improving its performance per unit energy…”
The car looks great, will it come to America? Is it gas and electric or just electric? How long for a charge up?. I live in Southern California, and these thyme of cars would sell very well depending on the price. If it's under 50 grand theybwould sell a lot of them, 50- 100 it would still sell pretty well, over 100,000 they would loose a lot of market share.