NY Times:
"Hold on to your hat!" Jim Burns shouted as he slammed the accelerator to the floor. With a high-pitched whine, the electric motor behind my seat burst into action, and "the Enigma" - an experimental red sports car in which I was riding shotgun - bolted forward, pressing me back into my leather seat. In about three seconds we were whipping through the San Diego State University campus at 50 miles an hour."We built her really low, so she totally hugs the ground," Burns said as we coasted to a stop at a large intersection near Highway 8. "Watch this." When the light turned green, he floored it again while yanking the steering wheel to the left so that in the middle of the intersection we performed two 360-degree doughnuts, complete with white smoke pouring off the shrieking back wheels. The nearby drivers stared. Giggling, Burns, a mechanical-engineering professor, straightened the wheel and roared out of the intersection; a stolen glance backward revealed that we had left a thick trail of burned rubber on the asphalt. We finally coasted to a halt near his campus laboratory, where a team of students was waiting with a video camera.
"Dude, that was awesome!" one of them blurted.
I had to agree: it was a heck of a ride. Yet this car, so sleek and aggressive on the outside, hides an earnest do-gooder secret beneath its hood. The Enigma is a hybrid, a distant cousin of the Hollywood environmentalist favorite, the Toyota Prius. It has both a normal fuel-burning engine (diesel, in this case) and an electric motor, which cooperate so the engine runs only at peak efficiency. Together, they give the Enigma an astounding fuel efficiency of 80 miles per gallon.
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