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"   The last Detroit Electric rolled off the production line in 1937. In 2008, former CEO of the Lotus Engineering Group Albert Lam purchased the rights to the defunct brand and set to work with his team developing a new electric car. Last night in Detroit Electric&amp;#039;s Fisher Building home (once occupied by the Fisher Body Company), the company unveiled its first new offering, the $135,000 SP:01, and its plans for the future.  If you&amp;#039;re looking at these pictures and thinking, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a Lotus Exige,&amp;quot; you&amp;#039;re partially correct. The SP:01 rides on the same chassis but it has been significantly reworked for all-electric duty and sports some unusual features. The whole body is carbon fiber in an effort to keep weight down. It weighs in at a feathery 2403 lbs. The car also has a bespoke leather interior, but no built-in, radio or CD player. More on that later. Power runs from a 37-kWh lithium polymer battery to an AC syncronous motor that&amp;#039;s 91 percent efficient and delivers 201 hp and 165 lb-ft of torque. Unlike most electric cars, this one comes with gearboxes. There are two row-your-own transmissions\u2014the standard 4-speed manual or optional 5-speed\u2014and a 2-speed slushbox. Performance is darn impressive, with 0-60 mph in under 3.7 seconds and a top speed of 155 mph. That&amp;#039;s enough for the company to claim the SP:01 as the fastest EV in the world.   Things get interesting when we start talking about vehicle control, power management, and charging. Like all EVs and plug-in hybrids these days, the Detroit Electric has a smartphone app. This one&amp;#039;s called SAMI; it controls charge times and takes advantage of low electric rates, but does plenty more. Because the car has no traditional controls, vehicle settings like regen braking, heating and cooling, interior lighting, and pretty much everything else are done on the phone. The car relies completely on streamed or brought-in music from the phone for audio entertainment and GPS. There&amp;#039;s even a compass feature in the app to find your lost car. Outsourcing all these features to the smartphone significantly cuts weight and in-car complexity. The company also addresses ever-present range anxiety with the Emergency Energy Release feature. It allows the driver to access the last 10 percent reserve in the battery to make it to a charging point. This feature is accessible only five times before having to be reset; completely draining a battery hurts its lifespan.    Perhaps the most innovative feature is called &amp;quot;Vehicle to X&amp;quot; which allows the car to do several things. It can suck down cheap power at night time and return it to the grid at peak times for credits with the power company. It can transfer power directly to another car. And the last feature, called 360 Powerback, is really clever. IF the car is plugged into the home charging point and grid power fails, the system sends your phone a message asking if you&amp;#039;d like the plugged-in car to power the house. Confirm the request and electricity in the battery runs the home for up to two days.  Beyond the SP:01, Detroit Electric talked about its plans for the future and manufacturing strategy. The company is realistic about the SP:01 being a fairly outrageous car and is already developing a four-door sedan with a hatchback variant, aimed at the $32,000 price range set for a late 2014 debut. But on a broader scale, its leaders are planning to operate unlike the traditional car company model. Rather than making enormous investments in the hard tooling, casting, and crash testing required to build a basic car, Detroit Electric intends to operate as a contract manufacturer piggybacking on the excess capacity of other manufacturers. They&amp;#039;ve designed the power, control, and battery systems to be as modular as possible and fit in almost any vehicle shell.    The SP:01 will see final assembly begin in August at an as-yet unnamed facility in the Detroit area, but there will only be 20 employees to start. Much of the manufacturing happens elsewhere, and even in North American Operations CEO Don Graundstadt&amp;#039;s wildest dreams, he foresees only 300 positions in Detroit. Slow-growth and learning from the mistakes of others is the plan.  Still, it&amp;#039;s good to see a once-well-known brand make a return to the street. Now it&amp;#039;s time to find out if they can deliver as promised. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a8886/detroit-electric-sp01-ev-15306184/>