Throughout history, some of the most iconic cars that have ever made it to production were initially conceived thanks to small teams of skunkworks engineers working overtime to unofficially develop something they were passionate about. If it wasn’t for these die-hard designers, cars like the Mazda MX-5 and latest Honda Civic Type R may never have made it to showrooms.
And now it seems we’ve found our first skunkworks-created EV, hailing from Nissan’s Technical Centre in Barcelona and taking the form of a rather more capable Leaf. Working overtime and weekends, the engineers here have created a car that features double the battery power of the standard car, weighing in at at 48kWh – still effectively 12kWh off what even the lowest specc’d Model S can manage, but mightily impressive for a humble Leaf.
The first thought that sprung to our minds was ‘just how much fast will it go now?!’, but unfortunately, it seems the car was built more for endurance than for outright speed. Nissan tells us it will now be entered into races such as the ECOseries endurance event.
Still, it’s a great sign that Nissan is open to the idea of cranking up the power in its EVs. Maybe an EV sports car soon, if that’s not too much to ask?
