Bolwell electric supercar possible

When the Bolwell 500 is revealed later this year, it will pack a thumping mid-mounted 6.2-litre Chevrolet V8.

Consider that the 500hp/373kW LS3’s significant muscle only has to propel a sub-1000kg mass, and there’s no doubt the all-new, hand-crafted Australian supercar will be fast.

But as Bolwell company director Campbell Bolwell explained to carsales.com.au, the Nagari's lightweight design also lends itself to battery power, opening the possibility for EV application.

"The idea of an EV powertrain interests us a lot,” said Bolwell, who is currently putting his new rear-drive exoticar through final testing in Australia.

"We've got some advantages over other cars. The Nagari is extremely light weight thanks to a rigid occupant capsule, for example.

"So we can get the weight down if we turned it into an EV," he added.

But despite being a long-held desire, Bolwell cautioned that developing a Nagari EV would cost millions of dollars – money that's unlikely to eventuate.

"We don’t have the funds to pursue it, quite frankly,” he said.

"We looked at it. I spend some time in the US looking at the system used by Tesla. I got a lot of info and seriously looked at doing something with the Nagari 300," he said of his 2009 Toyota V6-powered creation.

"It's still possible," he said of a battery-powered Bolwell 500, which takes advantage of a new composite tub made of Kevlar, carbon-fibre and fibreglass, but conceded the "development work would be costly".

"There's no funds for it and we're not expecting anything from the government," he said, despite the opposition Labor party's recent pledge to ensure that half of all new cars sold annually by 2030 will have some form of electrification.

As it stands, however, the Bolwell founder and director is upbeat about the Nagari 500, whose 500hp engine and sub-1000kg weight should endow it with supercar-like acceleration.

Equipped with adaptive dampers, ceramic disc brakes and a contemporary cockpit with digital screens, the Nagari 500 is scheduled to be launched in October 2019, before deliveries begin in 2020.

Although pricing has not been confirmed for the low-volume Melbourne-made machine, it won't be comparable to the road-going Brabham BT-62 hypercar which is tipped to cost almost $2 million a pop.