CIRCUIT TROIS-RIVIERES, Que. — Whoever said electric cars were too quiet has never driven Nissan’s new Nismo RC. A true racecar, the Nismo, like all true racecars — be they fossil- or lithium ion-fueled — has been stripped to the bone. So, despite having nary a piston internally combusting nor tailpipe emitting, the resulting cacophony is incredible: Immediate, omnipresent and, because we have all been schooled to think of electric cars as the most silent of ghosts, startling.
And that’s with the steering wheel’s little red “engine tuning” knob turned down to its lowest, For-God’s-sake-don’t-crash-into-the-bridge-abutment-at-Porte-Duplessis-corner power restriction. Wicked up to all-valence-electrons-at-the-ready Level IV, said scream takes on Hitchcockian proportions.
Now here’s the even more impressive part. Everything inside the Nismo RC is stock Nissan Leaf. Everything. Motor, inverter, the entire drivetrain is plucked from a Leaf Plus without modification, revision or improvement. Oh, there’s two of everything — well, motor and inverter at least — but they are, Nissan swears up and down, sourced right from the street-going Leaf’s production line.
Which makes the speculation — or is it simply wishful thinking — from Car and Driver that Nissan will build just such a dual-motorsportster very interesting. No details are forthcoming, but C&D says that with Nissan planning to launch eight new EVs by 2022, the “RC’s motors and torque-vectoring control will most certainly appear in more conventional wrappers.”