- This Cobra kit car EV conversion has the three-motor powertrain and 100 kWh battery pack out of a Tesla Plaid.
- With over 1,000 horsepower and 1,450 fewer pounds to carry, it has whiplash-inducing acceleration.
- Even with slicks, its all-wheel-drive system can't put all the power down when you punch it at 45 mph.
While there are many EV conversions that feature Tesla drive units and battery modules, there are hardly any that feature the bonkers three-motor Plaid powertrain with 1,060 horsepower. This lengthened and widened Cobra kit car is one of them, and it’s pretty bonkers.
The car needed to be bigger to fit the 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack out of a Model S Plaid and its three motors. You can see how much metal was added since it’s not painted, and the car looks about two feet longer than standard as well as about 10 inches wider. The longer wheelbase and wider track should also help improve comfort, stability at high speeds and the predictability of the handling while driving the car spiritedly.
It has Plaid front and rear subframes, so the wheels still stick out even though the body has been widened. The wheelbase appears to be a bit shorter than a Model S Plaid’s.
The vehicle was built by Don Swadley, who used a special custom controller created by Ingenext that makes the powertrain work. The result is impressive and, frankly, a bit scary too. We’d love to see this on a drag strip to see how it compares with the world’s quickest-accelerating vehicles.
Weighing around 3,300 pounds, it’s considerably lighter than a Model S Plaid, which weighs nearly 4,800 pounds. That’s an almost 1,500-pound difference, which explains why the acceleration looks so scary in the driving video posted by Revolt Systems. It shows the car not only accelerating from a standstill and pinning the occupants to their seats even under partial throttle but also how all four tires lose traction even when you floor it at higher speeds.
This Cobra is lighter and should, therefore, be even quicker than the Dodge Challenger Hellcat Plaid swap we featured last month.
The car has fully slick tires, whose grip on an unprepared surface and, when not up to temperature, can vary greatly. Even with all-wheel drive and sticky tires, though, this is still a pretty scary EV conversion, although if you take it to a drag strip with a grippier surface, it should catapult itself off the line and easily beat a Model S Plaid.
