24 Hours of Lemons Announces a Separate Class for Electric Cars

The brain trust at the 24 Hours of Lemons believes the series is about to make galactic history: “Best as we can tell, the Lemons Electric Class Presented by AltThusiast is the first time all-electrics will go head to head against internal combustion machines in endurance racing.”

Yep, there’s now a separate Lemons class for electrics. There’s some coin on the line, too–or, specifically, 5.5 tons of coin. Should an electric vehicle take the overall win at a Lemons race, its team will be blessed with 1 million nickels courtesy of AltThusiast.

“EV is the highest performing, most technically interesting part of the car world, and car enthusiasts aren’t paying the slightest attention,” explains Jay Lamm, Chief Perp at the 24 Hours of Lemons. “I want to change that–to make car enthusiasts realize and get excited about this new era of effectively unlimited power, effectively unlimited packaging, and vastly reduced mechanical complexity. What’s taking place now is a giant boon for us as enthusiasts, not a threat to us as enthusiasts.”

The EV class will allow battery swapping, while the powertrain and energy storage systems don’t count towards the series’ $500 budget cap. An EV section has been added to the Lemons rulebook as well.

“It’s really, really hard,” Lamm says to those contemplating entering an EV. “There are extremely big, but ultimately solvable, technical challenges. There are even bigger, but ultimately solvable, safety challenges. It’s in no way a trivial undertaking: The conceptual, engineering, fabrication and organizational issues are enormous. In other words, it’s exactly why smart people go racing.”

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