This past weekend saw Monterey Car Week at perhaps its most excessive ever. The auctions set records, including $42.9 million for one of six Shelby Daytona Coupes and $40 million for Ferrari’s first Luce electric vehicle to reach private hands. Hypercars and restomods with seven-figure price tags filled the California peninsula, and yet I know I’m not alone in mustering little enthusiasm for this kind of thing. Which is why today I’m writing about the antithesis of all that: a hand-built, low-cost, efficient, and remarkably cheap car that suggests one possible future for driving enthusiasts, should we choose to take it.
This is because the answer cannot just be “add more power and go even faster.” Forget hypercars; even regular sports cars like a Porsche 718 Boxster or Toyota Supra have more performance than you can comfortably use on the road, and each version gets more power and costs more than the last. Add the cost of tires, consumables, a thirsty engine, and the fact that cars are all so ludicrously expensive to begin with these days, and soon the whole thing starts to look unsustainable.
Robert Ely’s Gasolini AR1, as featured on Jonny Smith’s “The Late Brake Show” yesterday, is none of those things. The UK has a long history of being more permissive than most when it comes to allowing cars hand-built in sheds to be registered for road use, and the AR1 is true to tradition and makes use of plenty of existing parts.
The engine, gearbox, wiring loom, and dash all come from a 2017 Honda CBR500 motorbike, with the two-cylinder inline engine mounted behind the single-seat cockpit and driving the rear wheels via a prop. Forget about a crazy tune on the engine; it still generates just 47 hp (35 kW) and 32 lb-ft (43 Nm). But it also weighs less than 1,000 lbs (454 kg). And the point here is to have fun, not go fast. So the wheels and tires are skinny, courtesy of a Ford Ka.
The shape is certainly unique; Ely told Smith he wanted to make something using 2D shapes with ’90s sci-fi vibes, a design brief that appears to have been well met. A pair of small holes in the nose suck air into the AR1’s radiator, with NACA ducts along the side allowing the warm air to escape. In addition to the aerodynamic pods that house each wheel, the exposed suspension elements also wear teardrop-section covers to cut drag.
The result is a car that looks extremely fun to drive at legal speeds, and even when driven hard, it should return about 41 mpg (5.7 L/100 km). Ely is also working on AR2, which swaps the CBR500 powertrain for a HyPer 9 electric motor and some battery cells from a Jaguar I-Pace. Still under construction, the AR2 might be a little bit hairier, with double the horsepower and four times the torque.
Ely isn’t going to build any more AR1s, but he reckons you can make one yourself for less than $7,000, and he will happily sell you the plans and instructions to make your own. His Gasolini YouTube channel also has a whole build series you can watch, which reminded me of Mark Evans’ “A Car Is Born” series, but with less talking and more ASMR.
If only I had a shed, I could eventually find out what Washington, DC’s DMV is like when it comes to trying to register a homemade car.
