Thursday, March 2, 2017

Puma Sports Car electric www.evdrive.co.za

YouTube clip below, I found of a supposed electric powered Puma sports car developed in South Africa. Unfortunately the web page at www.evdrive.co.za doesn't
exist any longer.

I can't really find much info on the Puma electric sports car so I don't know what happened to the project. I did find though a site Puma In South Africa. The Puma was a Brazilian design built in Durban in the 70's
South African Puma production began in Durban in 1973. The car was basically the Brazilian GTE but there were some differences. South African GTE's were right hand drive rather than left hand drive as were the Brazilian made cars. Also, the South African Pumas were built on VW Beetle pans and had front drum brakes.
Unfortunately it wasn't in production for very long.
A total of 357 units were produced and sold in a matter of 21 months. One of these was exported to Australia to test that market. Unfortunately, the lack of cost control in the manufacturing operation led to the downfall of the company. 
The company seems to have been resurrected many years later and the new company's page can be found here. That page though doesn't appear to have been updated since 2011, the same year the above video clip was published. It was they who were building the electric version.
Most recently, the company has developed a battery powered electric version of Puma which is claimed to equal or exceed the performance of the standard car.  
The page where I sourced this information from was also last updated in 2011, so it remains a mystery to what happened to Puma and their electric sports car.

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