2005 K-1 Attack - The Philadelphia High School Car

One of the coolest stories of the past decade was about the Philadelphia high school students who built an electric / bio-diesel supercar.

The car above is that car... for the most part.

It's actually the body. The diesel engine, electric motor, batteries and, I'm not sure why, the dashboard, have been removed.

The body itself is a K-1 Attack. It's made by K-1 Engineering, a Slovakian car company. It is, in fact, the only Slovakian car company.
You can find their website here.

The K1 Attack is a beautiful body. There are supposedly somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 in the US. One, if I remember correctly, is powered by a 400 HP supercharged Honda engine.

You could buy this body and drop whatever engine you want into it. Me? If I were buying it, I'd hire some of the Philly high school alumnus to bring it back to its electric / soybean glory. According to a 2005 Autoblog.com story, the student's Attack developed 300 hp from an "AC electric motor powering the front wheels and a 1.9L VW TDi biodiesel powering the rears. The batteries powering the electric motor act as capacitors able to discharge a lot of energy in short bursts, enough for 0-60 runs in the sub 4-second range. Under normal driving conditions the car is powered by the biodiesel engine and achieves 50mpg."

0 - 60 in under 4 seconds? The over-hyped Tesla isn't any faster (3.9 seconds, according to their website) and after 250 miles, you have to stop and plug it in.
This car you just fill up with biodiesel (the students used soybean oil) and keep on cruising.

I don't know how much money it would take to bring it back to its original state, but I would bet it would be no more than the $100K+ a new Tesla costs.

Located in Philadelphia (of course), click here to see the eBay listing for the K-1 Attack body / chassis.

You can find a recent story here about these Philly kids beating MIT in a 10 million dollar contest.

You can find the West Philly Hybrid X Team website here.