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An Electric Car Unlike Any Other
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More Torque than a Dodge Viper and Skinny as a Motorcycle
Rick Woodbury and son Bryan have a plan to dominate the global automotive market with a revolutionary electric vehicle the width of a motorcycle that has more torque than a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 and can outperform many sports cars. With one complete car made and sold so far — to George Clooney, no less — they need about $50 million to jump-start large-scale production at their start-up firm, Commuter Cars Corp.
The $108,000 Tango T600 uses two electric motors powered by roughly 1,000 pounds of batteries to generate a total of 1,000 pound-feet of torque. Its range maxes out at 80 miles.
“The plan is to put 150 million of these cars on the road within 15 to 20 years,” said Woodbury, who speaks with infectious enthusiasm. “I'm not saying this will happen overnight; I'm saying it will happen gradually.”
Spokane, Wash.-based Commuters Cars, which Woodbury runs with his son, already builds and sells the Tango T600 — actually, father and son build the car themselves pretty much by hand. It costs $108,000 and doesn't meet federal crash regulations, though it does comply with race-car safety regulations designed to protect drivers in crashes of up to 200 mph.
The T600 is sold as a partially assembled kit in order to skirt federal safety regulations, which would require millions in research and development costs (not to mention several vehicles to crash test) in order to comply with. It ships 95 percent complete; Woodbury arranges sale and delivery of the remaining 5 percent and will even fly wherever needed to bolt it together — though it's not too difficult for the mechanically inclined to do themselves using the included manual, he said.
In a nod to its appeal to affluent consumers, the Tango T600 is featured on the cover of the 2006 holiday preview catalog for Hammacher Schlemmer, a New York City-based chain of stores that sells high-end home and office products, electronics and gadgets. The car is listed in the catalog, and on the company site, for $108,000 and can be purchased by calling 800/227-3528.
“Our car is 39 inches wide, making it the narrowest car in the world, yet it has stability akin to a Porsche 911,” said Woodbury, who raced 911s for car dealership Beverly Hills Porsche Audi, where he once worked. The slender T600 doesn't look stable, but the weight of up to 25 batteries used to power two electric motors sitting four inches off the ground all but cement the tires to the road. It has a maximum range of 80 miles and can be fully charged from a standard home plug outlet in three hours.
Gridlock No More
The idea for the Tango's mix of car and motorcycle attributes came to Rick Woodbury decades ago while crawling in L.A.'s highway gridlock. He noticed that there was only one person in almost every car and decided that doubling the road capacity for all of those single occupants by using lanes and cars half as wide as normal would solve the gridlock problem, not to mention reduce pollution and fuel consumption. "The government could just draw a line down an already existing lane and make two Tango-size lanes," he said. The T600 is designed to have more clearance on either side of it in a six-foot-wide lane than a tractor-trailer does in existing 12-foot lanes.
George Clooney bought Commuter Cars' first Tango T600 electric vehicle.
George Clooney bought the first T600 last fall during production of Ocean's Twelve after reading about it in a magazine. At publication time, two others were being built for clients whose names Woodbury wouldn't disclose.
In order to crash-test and get two less-expensive, more basic models into production — called the T100 and T200, which should retail for $18,700 and $39,900, respectively — the Woodburys are looking for a $50 million infusion to create full-fledged engineering and production facilities. To prove there's a viable market to would-be investors, they're using the Commuter Cars website to secure fully refundable deposits for future Tangos: $10,000 for the T600, $1,000 for the T200 and $500 for the T100. So far, they've amassed 75 deposits for Tangos since they began taking orders online a couple of years ago.
The seminal T600, which seats two in one row, would seem to hold a particular appeal to residents of L.A., where "lane-splitting" — driving down lane dividers in backed-up traffic — is legal. More than half (57 percent) of the 280 people that Woodbury informally polled at a recent L.A. auto show said that they would drive a Tango in order to avoid traffic jams.
Usually lane-splitting is reserved for motorcycles, but the T600 is narrow enough to fit between two lanes of cars. In fact, at 39 inches wide, it's actually narrower than Honda's beefiest cruiser motorcycle, the Gold Wing, which is 44 inches wide. Another advantage to the slender footprint is that the Tango can be parked in small spaces usually reserved for motorcycles, including perpendicular to the curb, where laws allow.
