Click for a high-res gallery

GM product development guru Bob Lutz has become particularly enamored of electric drive vehicles recently. As one of the major internal corporate sponsors of the Chevy Volt within GM, Lutz has been even more vocal than usual for the past year about the E-Flex program. Unfortunately even though Lutz has been one of the few to drive the Volt mule or Mali-Volt, it's still a good 30 months (at least) away from Job 1. While biding his time and pushing the Volt engineering team along, he is adding other battery powered vehicles to his collection.

Lutz's latest toy is a new Vectrix electric scooter. The Vectrix launched last fall and according to company treasurer John Schnorr they have built about 2,000 scooters so far and sold about half of the those. While the bike was lauded at launch for stylish looks and decent performance, the original $11,000 price tag was deemed a bit to steep. Vectrix recently reduced the price down to a more reasonable although still not cheap $8,795. Schnorr was on hand at Lutz's home to personally deliver the new machine. Read more and check out the video after the jump.


Photos Copyright ©2008 Sam Abuelsamid / Weblogs, Inc.

Click on the image to watch the full video

As the video pasted after the break points out, running a 26 mile marathon is a tough task as it is. Though this writer couldn't hope to complete one anyway, doing so while bracketed by pollution-spewing cars and motorcycles makes it that much harder. So, we love the idea of using Vectrix electric scooters as the pace-setters and support vehicles for the just-finished Boston Marathon.

The video also mentions lighter but higher capacity batteries on the horizon. We can only assume that this refers to lithium ion packs. Take note of the electric MP3-style scooter that we've mentioned before which is slated to go on sale in eight months along with the electric sportsbike that could go on sale within a few years, depending on the interest level. The video concludes by making mention of the Brammo Enertia (see our ride here) and Zero Motorcycles off-road bike.

Two pieces of interesting Vectrix news coming your way today, you lucky readers! One, we hear that Vectrix might be debuting their long-rumored electric Superbike on November 6th in Milan. We'd be very happy if this one turns out to be true, and even happier if the bike were equipped with lithium ion batteries. For sportbike use, we'd want to see at least 100 miles per hour from the bike with excellent acceleration. We also think that the range should be better than the scooter too, which would of course also raise the price of the cycle. Trade-offs!

The second piece of news to share was featured in the print version of Popular Science in their April '07 issue. We've known for some time that Vectrix was planning to have a three-wheeler based on the Piaggio MP3's innovative leaning front suspension system, but we missed the picture from PopSci (.pdf), which claims that the bike will be out in '08 and will cost $12,000. We can't verify any of that information, though, so we'll wait for an official announcement from Vectrix on the matter before we get too excited.

[Source: Motoblog, Popular Science]