A Tesla Model S Plaid will take part in the 2021 Mt. Washington Hillclimb, where 80 cars try to go up the 7.6-mile, 4,618 vertical feet road as fast as possible.
According to this post/video, it will be the first electric car to participate. (But see the first comment below, which says they’re been involved for a while.)
Electric cars are awesome for racing because of their constant torque, of course – they blow away internal-combustion engines. I don’t know how climbing affects their performance vs. ICE does for climbing, however.
A side note: Poking around for this item I found that there’s a list of cars which are banned from going up the auto road, usually because their brakes fail or they can’t stay in first gear on the way down (although the Hummer is banned because it’s too wide). Here’s an article about that from 2016..
Return to the Concord Monitor
I wonder where they get the idea this will be the first electric car raced at Mt. Washington? The EVSR team among others, has been racing EVs at the hillclimb for years.
“The 2014 running of Climb to the Clouds included the first electric race car to compete in the history of this event. EVSR, the fully electric racecar created by Entropy Racing, was piloted by Tim O’Neil, former overall hill record holder, to a time of 7:28. O’Neil bested his previous overall hill record by 16 seconds and put his mark onto Mt. Washington once more by setting the fastest electric record.” — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hillclimb_Auto_Race
EVSR was not the first electric car to compete up Mt Washington. I drove the Mt Washington hill climb in 1998 with a Solectria Force electric car and had a time of 14:10.67, which may have been an EV record at the time. Team New England ran the race in 1994 with a modified solar race car (only batteries, no solar panels) with a time of 16:11 if memory serves. Having said that, EVSR’s time of 7:28 is very impressive, congratulations!