Beat this Mr Bond: An inflatable electric car that can drive off cliffs, and float

21 June 2008

XP Vehicles, Inc. an electric powered automobile technology startup has combined proprietary aerospace engineering and novel power systems to make what it calls ''the best priced, safest, longest-range-electric, most durable, vehicles on Earth.''

The company hopes to have a prototype of the inflatable electric car by the end of the year, with production scheduled for 2010 at the earliest.

The company taps disruptive patent protected technologies, utilising safe non-grid-connected energy cassettes to produce the electricity to run a polymer airbeam, carbon fibre constructed ultra light and safer bodied automobiles priced at very low invoices with extremely high energy efficiency, according to a statement on its website. It says that this proven technology gives the automobile consumers a quantum leap into the future where alternate energy vehicles will be prevalent with a market size of over $200 billion. 

XP Vehicles pegs the key advantages over competitors by saying that these are the safest, longest range lowest cost vehicles which can be flat-pack shipped directly to users. The company holds the intellectual property rights to the inflatable vehicle system, business model and architecture, and has some designs in development.

The car's features include an unbelievable driving range of over 2500 mile range using its patented hot-swap XPack Multi-Core Battery/Fuel Cell power plant. That would mean traversing most of the United States, which is roughly 3,000 miles across, or a respectable 300 miles on a single charge.

XP Vehicles says that this hot-swap process was invented and patented its founders,and extensive ability to customize and mitigate obsolescence (it says that EVERYTHING is upgradeable), the car can be shipped directly to customers, who can assemble it, or can have the dealer assemble it. Some of its models can change bodies, some models fold after assembly for storage or parking.