Which, if you’re going to race flying vehicles, is probably the way to start. You certainly don’t want to begin the experiment by sticking ten of them on a starting grid and seeing what happens on the first corner.

These eVTOLs are dragging it out

As part of getting ready for the EXA race series, which should start sometime this year, two Airspeeder M3 craft lined up over a 300-metre ‘track’ and sent head-to-head down a straight light. The two craft hit up to 154km/h over the aerial battle, with the red one going just a little bit faster. Because that’s how races work.

While there’s space for pilots inside these electrically-powered vertical takeoff and landing craft, they’re currently powered remotely — which makes them very large, expensive drones at this point. The plan is to test the race series concept for safety using unmanned aircraft first, before actually sticking human pilots inside and risking lives for human entertainment.

It’s not all for entertainment, though. There’s a development side to this whole thing as well. The company says that its “…innovations will hasten the arrival of new advanced air mobility (AAM) technologies. Close but safe air racing is assured through [the] latest LiDAR and radar technologies that create virtual forcefields around the sport’s cutting edge quadcopter format flying cars. Rapid hair-pin turning manoeuvrability is delivered using a multicopter layout.”

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Gotta go fast

Which, if you check out the promotional video of the Mustang Cobra Jet, seems totally legit. The electric vehicle takes off from the start of a drag strip like an overtuned monster from 2007’s Need for Speed: Pro Street, lifting on two wheels before dropping back to the track and rocketing over the finish line. Its top speed over the section is 168mph, or 270km/h — which is a crazy speed to hit traffic light to traffic light.

Mark Rushbrook, global director at Ford Performance Motorsports, said “Since revealing the car, we’ve continued to fine-tune it and now know we’re just scratching the surface of what we may be able to achieve with this much electric horsepower in a drag racing setting.” Which only confirms that you probably won’t be seeing this monster in traffic any time soon. That’s… probably a good thing.

The Ford Mustang Cobra Jet uses four PN-250-DZR inverters and two DS-250-115 Dual Stack motors from Cascadia Motion to achieve its performance, which translates to four motors spinning at up to 10,000 revolutions per minute. Each motor has a max output of 350kW, which is where we get that 1400 stapled onto the end of that overlong title. Ford Performance, working with a company called AEM-EV, uses “…an advanced data and control system that features a control algorithm unique to the Cobra Jet 1400.” Custom chassis tuning is also required.

And Ford’s not finished yet. Rushbrook added, “We are very interested in continuing to work with NHRA to determine how electrification can be part of the sport and to show off the Cobra Jet 1400 at max power in due course as regulations develop.” In other words, they think they can make it even faster. We’re looking forward to seeing that.

The post Ford’s Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 EV claims it can do the quarter mile in just 8.27 seconds appeared first on Stuff South Africa.