Venturi Volage test from Bibendum Challenge

After our piece on the Opel HydroGen4 and how it’s being overtaken by modern electric cars, here we with a golden question – just how fun can an electric sports car get? We got to know the Venturi Volage open top electric at the Challenge Bibendum, with our guys from Autoblog.

it.
The event is the perfect setting for such a drive given that the Volage takes advantage of its collaboration with Venturi, together with Michelin who was sponsoring the event.

We saw it back in 2008 at the Paris Motor Show, and here it is finally to electronically rumble its way onto the list of the most powerful electric supercars.
As per usual with Venturi, the technology is top class, with a flat platformed, all-wheel drive model with a carbonfibre chassis that gets weight down to 1,075 kg, batteries included (they weigh 350 kg).
That’s impressive by any sports car standard, let alone electric.

The thing that really hits us about the Venturi Volage though, is its engine setup.
It makes use of Michelin Active Wheels technology.
Basically the active wheel is one inside which the engine and suspension setting is inserted.

This means that we get four-wheel drive because each wheel is driven by its own electric motor of 55 kW, totaling 220 kW, or nearly 300 hp.
Venturi told us that the electric motors per wheel are in fact, two: one for the suspension and one for actually driving the vehicle.
That makes eight motors on one car.
At the Bibendum Challenge the Volage received the prize for the fastest acceleration of the cars present – getting to 50 km/hr in just 2.
2 seconds.
Not bad at all, we’d say.
Top speed is nothing to knock your socks off though – it’s limited to 150 km/hr to prolong the battery life.
This brings us to both a technical and philosophical discussion about sports cars, electric cars and electric sports cars.
The sports car vocation means top speeds and sometimes long distances – the electric car vocation is not exactly motoring along highways.
So it’s still hard to accept that a sports car can be an ecological car as well, the two having opposing characteristics and purposes.
The die-hard petrol heads among us will probably always cling to our classic combustion engines and not just for their performance.
But others have shown that the sports-electric mix can happen, and that has meant rocking the technological and philosophical boat.
That’s fine with us, but sometimes we put a question mark over the real world future of these models.