FIRST LOOK: Caterham Project V: 268bhp electrified lightweight

[Music] [Music] [Music] this is the katrum project V now this is a concept car that previews what a Catrin might look like with an actual roof and body workor that's more than just stylish tin foil but scarier than that this is a lightweight electric katrum cue the comment section Catching Fire right about now but how did we get here from the seven well Krum sevens are British built sports cars that are the epitome of paired back No Frills Back to Basics nerve jangers don't get me wrong I love a seven but now that I have respect for my lower back a Krum tends to look like a mobile torture chamber any car whose idea of luxury is a clip on roof and a heater that exclusively parboil your left knee is probably not going to be anything else than ruthless on the road and that's pretty much the case krums are old school and proud and my goodness I'm glad they exist but the company isn't daed you've got to look to the future or you'll become nothing but the past so it's time to meet son of the project V although this is very definitely not a seven could just be a 10 though yes that is a cerum with a roof and actual Bodywork and I happen to think it looks really grown up I mean let's look at it it's got this big bubble of a front wheel Arch which sort of caves down the side of the car and then runs back up into the second bubble which is this slick Coupe roof line that then runs down into a third bubble which is the rear hunch which looks really must muscular at the front you've got a central Grill that's flanked by two wide vents that makes the car look low and wide and I actually think those headlights carry a hint of Porsche or maybe that's just me this might be a bit weird but I like the way it sits there's a defined waspy waist and a kind of layered rear end that's like a tasty carbon cake the suspension is double Wishbone and fully adjustable front and rear and the wheels are 19 in up front and 20 at the back it's a proper sporty looking thing with plenty of potential this is supposed to be a concept car but it looks pretty real to me it reminds me of the Krum 21 of the mid 1990s but there's also more than a hint of the stillborn Krim c120 a failed co-pro with alpine and the janelli design one which is no surprise because krum's chief designer is um Anthony janelli but this car is more than just about what literally meets the eye because this is an electric sports car but more than that it's a lightweight electric sports car which a lot of the big players have been looking at really hard the rumors of electric Porsche Boxster are rif after all so what do we get well it's got a single electric motor that's mounted in the rear and drives the rear wheels and produces a relatively modest 268 brake horsepower but thanks to a composite aluminium chassis and composite body panels it's got a Target weight of 1,190 kg which is actually quite light if you take into account the fact that something lightweight and ice like an Alpine A110 weighs about 1100 kilos that's not far off I'll just have to avoid big dinners as for performance it's sort of largely in the same range so 0 to 62 mph in about 4 and 1/2 seconds and just over 140 mph top speed which is plenty to get yourself into trouble if you add in the adjustable suspension which means that you can make the project V handle like you want it to it'll be a very very attractive car this is all really good stuff but is this a real katrum or is it just some concept flight of fancy to find out I asked my old mate Bob who happens to be the CEO of katrum this is an electric Coupe how can that possibly be a c because it's simple lightweight and fun to drive and they're the Three core DN of every seven and what Krum is all about so how's that happened then if you were going to produce this in numbers simple lightweight and fun to drive how do you go about translating what catness is into an electric Coupe that doesn't have cycle wings and a really bad heater so every everything that we focus on is about weight here right so we're saying that we're going to produce this for 1190 kilos and everything on the car to justify itself from a weight perspective or anything that's not on the car saves us use of weight yeah we haven't got a frunk or a fruit as I to call it and that saves 10 to 12 kilos oh straight away from what just not having the fixings we haven't got anything to seal it the hinges the latches and the actual tray itself yeah and the space it frees up gives us more room to do what we need to do with the crash structure with the suspension so there's a big weight saving there but 12 kilos doesn't sound a lot but when you're looking through every aspect of the car we haven't got an embedded infotainment system Okay so we've just got iPhone or Android auto mirroring yeah and which is what everybody uses anyway exactly yeah and that means we haven't got a big two structure somewhere in the car or an ECU somewhere in the car that is taking weight and space so it's got a aluminium composite chassis and then it would have composite body panels if you so you're pulling the weight out of it all the time exactly and it's quite a relatively simple setup so it's a single rear motor it hasn't got an aw I mean you could make this have 400 horsepower and make it really really fast why have you gone for a relatively modest horsepower even in the concept you could say it had 1,000 horsepower and it's a concept car why talk about having that kind of slightly modest powertrain the per forance of this is similar to to one of our 420s 485 kind of model not 60 in in 4 and 1/2 seconds and we feel that that's enough to deliver that fun to drive element of the car I don't think we need to chase the numbers to get to you know not to 60 in less than two seconds it's it's it's it's it's old we're more about the dynamic performance of the cut and this is not focused on a track day for sure but if it ends up on a track day you know you don't use that not to 60 on a track day cuz you're not allowed to speed in the pits that's the only time you use it is to celerate of the pits you're more interested in Dynamic performance around the corners and that's what we want to deliver with this so steering feel involvement correct you know it's got adjust it would have adjustable suspension so you can set the car up how I'm assuming how you prefer it yes you've got a bit of adjustability within the kind of pitch for it then yeah just like a seven so it's got those same kind of intellectual properties as a seven but it's a lot more usable cuz this feels like a real usable car we we're a small company with limited resources we can't afford to do a show car throw it in a bin 6 months later and then start doing the real engineering right so from the beginning we've started with some real engineering and as you know this car was manufactured by it's how design and because they're part of a big OEM we've very luckily had access to their digital tools right so we mocked up the inside of this virtually sat inside a virtual mockup and did all the layout and packaged every millimeter exactly where we needed it I think the lack of aggression like you know everything's getting a bit bulky and scary and aggressive looking this is actually I just think it's quite stylish it's quite calm and I think it means that it won't date quickly and that's what we need because if you look at the seven the the seven was designed in the 50s literally yeah yeah yeah you know it's been 50 years under the katum brand name and more than a decade as a low to seven before that yeah and it still seems somehow Timeless cuz it's it's form over function yeah yeah and I think Anthony's taken the same approach here but looked at what we need to deliver from a regulation point of view today's modern lifestyle and an important point is that the Seven's not going anywhere and we're going to produce that car for into well into the next decade with an ice engine as a seven and this is to to complement that and grow the company as I've mentioned before we are a small company so this has to last us a number of years you know we haven't we're not in a position where we launch a car make it for three years and do a complete refresh we just don't have the resources to be able to do that so it somehow needs to be timeless the brand is timeless and the product seems to fit that very well interestingly un like a lot of other electric vehicles the battery pack in the project V is actually split so there's a portion of it up at the back near the rear axle and another little bit up at the front now given that the battery pack weighs about 330 kg that's not an insignificant thing to split but it should give the car a bit more of a kind of natural handling balance I really want to drive it to see how that feels in real life underneath the occupant's legs there's a 80 mil thick battery pack that slightly raises the floor slightly raises the feting foot position so that's why it feels quite that's why feels like you're fairly flat and the same as seven really yeah and we did that to keep the hit point of the seat the height from the ground to where your hip is yeah where it would be in a seven or back and down yeah yeah and then the rest of the battery pack is double that thickness and behind the occupants Yeah by doing that we keep the overall height of the car really really low cuz we haven't got that skateboard of batteries underneath the car underneath everything is this the only future for Krum or is there there seems to be a lot of thought into what makes a Krum what's the future for katrum as a brand you say Seven's going to keep going so the next step obviously is a Krum SUV electric uh and then some sort of luxury car yet well I haven't seen it for a while but I didn't realize you turned into a comedian and it's actually all good news in here as well because I think this is frankly brilliant because Krim hasn't gone all spaceship Concept in here it's very clean and it's very elegant and how good does this Dash look without having a 14in touchcreen plunked right in the middle yes there is a touchcreen down here but it's relatively small and it's just got carplay on it and then there's kind of a t-shaped center console with the top of the dash that just flares out into these digital but analog looking dials there just a pair of them in front of me and then a really small katrum style steering wheel it just feels really calm and really focused on what it needs to do and that's be a driver's car even the the way that I sit in this car it's quite low down and my hips are counted slightly forward so I feel like I'm sat in the car rather than on it and then the pedals are all in the right places it's interesting that when it comes down to it you don't need loads and loads of different functions there's a start stop and the gear selector on a rotary switch over here then a few dials and some toggles down here Windows different modes which it's got three of there's normal Sport and then a Sprint mode if you're doing a qual lap around the local car park um after that there's just AC and fan you don't need anything else and this appears to be a two-seater as I mentioned before uh and it is a bit concept but if you look in the back there's actually space for two more seats and because this is the concept you can have a single Central rear seat so this car can actually come as a two-seater with just storage back there uh a three- seater with a central rear seat or a four- seater and you won't get very big people but it's a really interesting concept personally I think I'd go for a two-seater and then some sort of storage for my backpack it would be really useful of course if you're in a normal katrum Krum 7 you'd be used to things rattling it'd be very very tight there'd be no head well there's infinite head room in a Krum 7 because they usually don't have a roof but this has got plenty of Headroom mainly because of that caned down hip action that means I'm sat quite low but there's lovely tactile materials all through the car this kind of ultra suede on the seats is fantastic the seats themselves are quite thin but super supportive there's even a slot for your mobile phone in the center console here they have actually thought of plenty of stuff but it still feels vaguely like a katrum I know that sounds ridiculous when you're looking around this interior but I think it's got to do with the fact that the steering wheel apart from the fact it just says katrum in the middle is very small it's very much like a seven the way you sit down into the car is like a seven the view is completely different the Acoustics are different but it's got kind of the spirit of a seven without being anything like it I've never been in a seven that's had all these modern acutal it's it's um it's really impressive and the one thing I keep coming back to is that this does not feel like a concept car everything about it feels like it could be production in 6 months time and that is really interesting how about practicality well that 55 K battery isn't ridiculously small about the same as you'd get in the average EV hatchback so you're looking at a possible 249 M of range if you drive conservatively which probably means not hammering it everywhere in Sprint mode plus there's 150 KW of onboard DC charging so you'd be looking at 20 to 80% in a quarter of an hour more than convenient enough even if you're driving with kerish enthusiasm I think the interesting thing here is that Krum has had a really good long look at the weight of an electric sports car balanced against the kind of performance and space and practicality that you might reasonably expect this hasn't got neck snapping acceler ation but it's plenty good enough and if you Ally that to where the battery sits and the adjustable suspension this could be a really confident handling car and yes it is coping with about 330 kg of battery weight there's no manual box and there's no noise admittedly but this is a really interesting idea KRON reckons after it did a proper feasibility study that the project V could be out in late 2025 or early 2026 and starting at a price of around £80,000 now that's expensive for katrum but it's pretty good for a junior Supercar let us know what you think in the [Music] comments

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 296,178

Keywords: Top Gear, caterham project v, car review, project v, electric vehicles, electric sports car, caterham 7, electric cars, electric caterham, lightweight ev, caterham project v interior, caterham project v concept, caterham v, sports cars, project v caterham, car reviews, fast cars, new car, caterham super seven, electric sports cars 2024

Id: 4P32NATfZO4

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023