Nissan Bladeglider concept ride review ~ station of gear

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17 Aug, 2016 7:00pm John McIlroy

We headed to Rio for a thrilling ride in the far-out Nissan Bladeglider three-seat electric concept car

The Nissan Bladeglider is one of the most radical concept cars of the past five years; an electric sports car with a unique look and a fascinating three-seat layout.

Now, Nissan has taken its original show car from the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show a step further by turning it into a pair of working prototypes - and Auto Express has had a passenger ride to get a feel for how this radical hi-tech layout could work on the road.

• Best sports cars 2016

The Bladeglider is almost as long as a Ford Focus, at 4,300mm, but it sits incredibly low to the ground, with a roof height of just 1,300mm. It is powered by a 220kWh lithium-ion battery driving a pair of 130kW (174bhp) electric motors - one on each of the rear wheels.

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That’s a heavy slug of power - and it doesn’t have much to push around, either, because the Bladeglider weighs only 1,300kg. So Nissan’s technical partner on the project - UK-based Williams Advanced Engineering - claims a 0-62mph time of less than five seconds and a top speed in excess of 119mph.

The cabin of the Bladeglider features that radical three-seat layout - with two rear seats positioned slightly behind and either side of the driver’s, giving both passengers surprisingly decent legroom. The view from the central seat is dominated by screens - with a pair of displays at either side of the central information panel. The steering wheel contains a Ferrari Manettino-style set of knobs that can control the Bladeglider’s traction control system; Williams has engineered in a number of different settings, including the ability to turn the technology off completely or have it in ‘drift mode’.

Our short shotgun ride around a Brazilian go-kart circuit allows Williams’s development driver on the project, ex-Lotus man Darren Cockle, to show off the advantages of the Bladeglider’s odd mix of a narrow front track and a much wider rear one. Even with the traction control deactivated, the Bladeglider shows a prodigious ability to cling on to any line that Cockle chooses to adopt.

There’s that seamless wave of instant electric performance, too - as you’ll feel in anything from a Nissan Leaf to a BMW i3, but with its sensation amplified here by your exposure to the elements and the fact that your bottom is about two inches off the ground. The performance is real, though; the start/finish straight at the track is desperately short, but we still see more than 110km/h (68mph) on the car’s central speedometer in a very short space of time.

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Nissan BladeGlider - front quarter doors open

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Nissan’s reps belted us in extremely tightly with a four-point harness, and the first few corners show why. There’s barely a chirp from the tyres as Cockle points the nose at the apex of a slower corner. He’s adept at hearing the first signs of the front tyres scrubbing across the asphalt, and uses that as his signal to feed back in the throttle. And once the Bladeglider is up to speed, it just hangs on in the faster stuff. It is, frankly, quite intoxicating, and huge fun; we’d have loved to have spent more time exploring the different settings.

The cabin accommodation feels odd if you’re a passenger - if you’re any more than six feet tall, you have to angle your legs in towards the driver as the dramatic scissor door comes down towards you. Getting in there in the first place is surprisingly easy, though - helped, of course, by the lack of a roof; there’s just a wraparound screen and a bar running down the middle of the car.

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Will it make production? Nissan sources refuse to comment on the significance of the Bladeglider’s transition from pure concept to working prototype - but the company is fully committed to expanding its range of EVs. As the firm’s global head of marketing and product strategy Roel de Vries told us, “The next step would be to add another EV to a volume sector, which probably isn’t sports cars. But there is an EV image to consider here too.”

We can’t give a star rating for a passenger ride, but there’s no doubt that the Bladeglider demonstrates an exciting vision of what an electric sports car can be. It is a fabulous, fascinating fusion of chassis and electric technologies, wrapped up in a stunning package. The ball is really in Nissan’s court now, though; if the firm really is committed to developing a wide range of electric cars, it should recognise the importance of green-lighting a production version of a halo vehicle like the Bladeglider. If not, then a more conventionally shaped pure-EV sports car - perhaps not in terms of raw sales, but as something to inspire new customers to consider adopting electric technology in their everyday vehicles.

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