Want to do 0 to 60 in under three seconds and up to 200 miles per hour on flats? You’ve got two options: Splash yourself with a shelf’s worth of random chemicals while holding a lightning rod in a thunderstorm, or pick up a C-X75 hybrid electric supercar courtesy India-based Tata Motors’ boutique car wing, Jaguar.
And you can have one, fully loaded and taxed, for the cut-rate price of $1.5 million. Stop-your-heart cheap, I know. Hey, there’s always the chemical-lightning-bath (it worked for Barry Allen and Wally West!).
“The C-X75 is absolutely at the forefront of technology, it’s as good as you can get right now,” said Tata Chief Executive Officer Carl-Peter Forster at a London press conference (via Bloomberg). “For me it’s also proof that the automobile is not the technology of the last century. It has a future.”
What’ll the future look like? Try that concept car shot up top. Tata trotted that out last September at a show in Paris, and says the final version will be more or less the same.
In the car: two–count them two–electric motors, plus a gas-based engine with “very low carbon emissions.” It’ll let you be twice as foolish as I’ve ever been in a vehicle (if you must know, a 1987 Ford Tempo doing 100 m.p.h. on countrified blacktop at night–thank you, fate, for not throwing up any deer) and take you 31 miles (50 kilometers) on electric power alone (presumably not at top speeds). Just don’t crash, because this thing’s made out of carbon-fiber, which makes it lightweight, but–having owned both bikes and laptops made of same–like silly-putty in a high-speed smash-up.
You’d best hurry if you want one, though: Jaguar says it only plans to make 250 (for a whopping $375 million in top-end spend). That, and you’ll have to wait to collect on your big-ticket purchase until they’re officially deployed, sometime late 2013.