Pyramidal Dream Car 123

The Dream Car 123 looks a bit like a giant baby walker dressed in a pyramid and has been grabbing headlines for about four years now.

Illinois inventor Greg Zanis has been peddling his street oddity since 2008, reasoning: “I've wanted to build this car ever since I was four or five years old.

“And finally, the technology has caught up with what I've been wanting to do,” stated Zanis.

For the early prototype in 2008 he was claiming a range of more 125km on a single 3.5 hour charge. Not bad for a 2.7 tonne vehicle with 80 lead-acid batteries in the steel I-beam hem of its plexi-glass skirt.

By 2009, Zanis was declaring he’d extended its range to something in the vicinity of 350km from its 48-volt power pack, and promising to power future generations with new-tech NiMH and lithium-ion batteries.

By 2011, while admitting his current model maxes out at 40mph (65km/h), he was sticking to long-held claims of speeds up to 320km/h, with range potential of 500 to 1000 miles (800-1600km) on a charge.

And that shape? It serves several purposes, not least as a giant spoiler generating the downforces the car will need at those amazing speeds. See the video below to see the Dream Car 123's performance and dynamics.

At each corner is an independent electric motor with sufficient steering manoeuvrability to turn a full 360 degrees on the spot, rather like a dalek.

Each motor runs on a four-pack of batteries, switching to another four-pack after about 100km. With 80 batteries on hand, well, that’s how he gets his range. The vehicle’s multiple chargers draw from an electrical outlet via a purpose-built garage that comes with it.

“It's also a very safe car,” Zanis said, explaining how the 12-inch I-beam subframe readies it and its occupants for any kid of crash. “So we like the spaceship kind of feel to it.”

Part of that safety formula hails from the bullet-proof glass he’s used for the turret, with a special honeycomb layer inside of the shell.

And just in case you’d managed to miss it, Dream Car 123’s 15W neon exterior lighting package makes your average LED daytime runners look pretty, well, average.

With each car costing about $8000 to build, Zanis is looking to sell it for about $24,000, dropping to about $16K factoring in government incentives and tax breaks for alternative-power vehicles.

The future? He’s optimistic. In a 2011 statement, he expressed hopes that “in the next year or so, I'm going to be building one a month, and I have a five-year business plan where I’ll be building 100 a year after that, 1000 a year after that, and 10,000 a year in five years.”