ANNOUNCER: David Pogue faces off against John Wayland, in a 1972 Datsun.

DAVID POGUE: Whoa! What's going on here? Eleven-point-eight seconds? He blew my doors off!

What is this?

JOHN WAYLAND: It's a Datsun.

DAVID POGUE: I see it's a Datsun, but what's under the hood?

JOHN WAYLAND: You know what? More important, what's in the trunk?

DAVID POGUE: Oh my, what is it? A, a flux capacitor from Back to the Future?

JOHN WAYLAND: That is a lithium polymer battery pack.

DAVID POGUE: This is an electric car?

JOHN WAYLAND: You didn't know that?

DAVID POGUE: We're not talking about a Prius here. It may look like a 1972 Datsun, but underneath this humble exterior lurks the White Zombie, which holds the record for the world's quickest street-legal electric car.

So where is, like, the pistons and the carburetor?

JOHN WAYLAND: Pistons? There are no pistons; there is no carburetor. There is a controller, and there's an electric motor and there's a battery pack. It's that simple.

DAVID POGUE: That's the entire system?

JOHN WAYLAND: Yeah. It generates 538 horsepower.

DAVID POGUE: Now that's 50 percent more horsepower than my muscle car, but it's not the ponies that make the Zombie so quick.

JOHN WAYLAND: So, it's all about acceleration. And at the drag track, to accelerate, you need torque.

DAVID POGUE: Wait. So what do you mean by torque? I thought that's one of those things that's a, a spoon and a fork combined.

JOHN WAYLAND: Torque is turning force. It's the amount of energy you need to open a jar or turn a wrench. In the case of cars, it's the amount of force that's applied by the engine to the axle, to turn the car's wheels. It's usually measured in a unit called foot-pounds.

DAVID POGUE: And how many does this car get?

JOHN WAYLAND: 1250.

DAVID POGUE: That's more than a Dodge Viper and this souped-up Porsche, combined; more than any car on the road, ever.

So if this was stopped at a stoplight…

JOHN WAYLAND: Mm-hmm.

DAVID POGUE: …and you had the most powerful gas car in the world next to you…

JOHN WAYLAND: That would be a Bugatti Veyron, about a $2,000,000 car.

DAVID POGUE: …and the light turns green, this…

JOHN WAYLAND: The Bugatti would be looking at our tail lights instantly.

DAVID POGUE: Believe it or not, the hard part wasn't building a motor that powerful, it was figuring out a way to power it. In the case of the Zombie, to go from zero to 60 in 1.8 seconds, Wayland needed serious power, more than 50 Prius batteries' worth.

So how did he get that kind of juice? It took over 15 years of trial and error, dead-ends and false starts, until the answer came to him from the sky.

The batteries that start these Apache helicopters are some of the most the powerful and efficient around. They use lithium, a highly reactive element, which means it can store a lot of energy: six times as much, per ounce, as the lead in your car's batteries. Problem is, lithium-based batteries store so much energy that they can also get really hot and start fires. The solution was to combine it with manganese, which generates much less heat.

Wayland re-configured them to power the Zombie.

JOHN WAYLAND: There are 12 actual batteries.

DAVID POGUE: And not only do they allow him to go really fast, they also allow him to go farther on a charge.

JOHN WAYLAND: So, all of a sudden, my little car here, instead of just being quick and fast, we're going 100 miles on a charge.

DAVID POGUE: Okay, I'm sold. How much do you want for this?

JOHN WAYLAND: Oh, no, it's not for sale. Would you like to drive it though?

Okay. It's going to peel your face back a little bit. Your vision may get a little blurry at first, 'cause the blood runs out of your retinas.

DAVID POGUE: Oh, man!

JOHN WAYLAND: It's kind of like being shot out of a cannon.

You'll be fine, man.

DAVID POGUE: Thanks a lot. I think.

Wahoo!