Dauphine's Inferno and electric burnouts.

After our hard-hitting expose' blew the roof off of the "The Renault Dauphine was a Cute Little car" secret, our mail server was inundated with a flood of one email. Diligent Reader John (surname redacted) created a piece of art with our humble little Dauphine PNG. Top of the optional features list for our Dauphine PNG file is a transparent background, which John fully exploited to put it right at home in hell, apparently.

That's some good masking and drop shadowing, John! I'd swear the car was actually surrounded by naked naughty people!

In the private hell reserved for petroleum industry executives, that Dauphine would be an electric model. What's that you say? I already have a picture of an electric Dauphine? How absurd! The very idea!

Gasp of outrage! What have I got here?

Yep! Somebody made an electric Dauphine for some reason... probably because the original motor just fell out of it after a light rain. Once you dump all the batteries in, and the motor controller, it looks like the car had room for possibly two people and a clipboard. Still, though, a useable electric car of any kind was pretty cool back in 1960. Let's see how this Dauphine's numbers stack up against a modern electric car designed by a huge team of geniuses, 54 years into the Dauphine's future.

	Nissan Leaf	Electric Dauphine
RANGE	75	60
TOP SPEED	93	35
RECHARGE TIME (standard AC)	6 or 8	8
PASSENGERS (incl. driver)	4	2
COOLNESS (scale of 100)	3	86

The Nissan Leaf, now unavailable with glow in the dark paint.

That's as may be. It's still a Leaf.

Hmm. The Leaf does out-perform the Dauphine in basically every area, except coolness. The Leaf looks like an emasculating joke, even with the not-available-for-purchase glow in the dark paint. Yes, really. But the Dauphine's numbers are pretty impressive for 1960. You'd think we would have made more progress in 54 years, but automakers didn't start taking alternative fuels seriously until maybe ten years ago.

The Dauphine tallies up a coolness score of 86, which is very respectable. "How could it be cooler?", you ask? It's top speed is 35. That could be improved upon by doing what Plasma Boy Racing's John Wayland did to his 1972 Datsun 1200. He shoehorned in a pair of electric forklift motors for something like 400 horsepower and 800 lb-ft of torque available from zero RPM. That would be pretty neat. Hellaciously cool, one may say.

Click for big.