In April this year, a group of graduate school students at Kyoto University announced the launch of a venture called Green Lord Motors [JP]. As the name suggests, it’s a car company, and yesterday, it took the wraps off its first offering [JP, PDF]: a replica of the popular Tommykaira ZZ as an electric vehicle.
The Tommykaira ZZ was a handmade sports car developed in Kyoto in 1997 by a small car maker (which stopped producing it after selling 200 units in Japan and internationally).
Technical details are scarce at this point, but Green Lord does say that their version, the so-called Tommykaira ZZ-EV has a fiber-reinforced plastic body and weighs 640 kilograms (just like the original vehicle).
The venture will start offering the electric car with a $81,000 price tag to customers worldwide in June 2011. It expects to sell 100 units a year.