I hadn't heard of this one until I stumbled across it while looking for
something else in Google. It's a high end niche car but none the less I
thought it was interesting.
Wheel motors, used on all electric locomotives, have, as far as I know,
never been used on a car (in recent memory, at least). Apparently the
reason is weight at the wheels. The Lightning, which isn't /quite/ on
the market yet, is supposed to use a new design of wheel motor with far
better power/weight ratio than previous engines. Of course it has
electric 4wd as a result, and along with nano titanate batteries from
Altair Nano, it achieves amazing performance and astonishing range and
breathtakingly short recharge times and all that good stuff electric
sportscar manufacturers like to talk about, for a price of less than
200,000 pounds Sterling.
Here's a story on it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xml=/motoring/2007/09/01/nosplit/mflight01.xml
http://tinyurl.com/2vun4k
