Performance

Clive Roberts, a GM lead development engineer, has firsthand experience with speed. He knows cars, electricity and racing — he races cars for fun. He already understands what every EV1 driver soon learns — this car performs! Clive drove a specially modified prototype of the EV1, without the 80 mph speed governor and with a special set of drive unit gears, into new territory for electric vehicles.

The day he set the land-speed record for electric cars on a Texas test track, Clive wanted 180 miles an hour. "We had to stay in the top lane on banked turns on the test track. No guardrail. Just a white line three feet from the top. After that, Texas. Get it wrong and you're in the Gulf of Mexico." His strategy: "Keep it to the floor; hang below that white line." His result: 183 mph and a world land-speed record for a production electric vehicle set at 6:30 p.m. on March 11, 1994, at Fort Stockton, Texas.

	Click here to see the EV1 set the electric vehicle land speed record (3000k)
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