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00:02This incredible hand built supercar can go from nought to 60 in under 3 seconds and can
00:17reach speeds of over 200mph!
00:19But it will cost you between 94 and 128 thousand dollars to buy one.
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00:25It's easy to drive, it gives you a lot of confidence, it inspires some really daring
00:30manoeuvres and craps, but it's just fun. Everyone who gets out of it has a huge smile on their
00:36face.
00:37The Lucra was the brainchild of Luke Richards and he set up his California based boutique
00:42car company to manufacture it.
00:44I first came up with the idea for the Lucra car in 2005. We got our first prototype in
00:502006. The job of the car is to be a lightweight, high-performance, high-powered car.
00:58The aim of his design was to combine the speed and power of an American muscle car with the
01:03manoeuvrability of a European sports car.
01:06My father told me you could either have a car that was fast in the straightaways or
01:12a car that was fast in the corners. Back then the Camaros and the Mustangs were big horsepower
01:18and the Lotuses and the European sports cars were lower horsepower Porsche, but lighter.
01:22Growing up in England and growing up in America, I kind of felt like I had a passion for V8s
01:27but I also had a passion for lightweight sports cars. So I did what he said was impossible
01:32and we made both in one.
01:34The lightweight body is made from carbon fibre, but it's not just about how little weight
01:38there is, it's also about where it is.
01:41We kept the car down around 2000lbs, even with a V8, and we made the car pretty stout.
01:47We didn't skimp out on any of the safety or rigidity because that's equally important.
01:51We also made the car tail heavy, so the weight distribution is about 55 to the rear, but
01:57this gives it a nice mid-engine car feel.
02:00It has a little bit of oversteer, it likes to drive through corners, it's really easy
02:04to drive, really friendly, really difficult to spin, I mean really difficult to get out
02:09of control, and we've tried completely.
02:12It makes for a very high performance car that's really easy to drive by a novice, or a professional.
02:18Each Lucra is built to order, and from start to finish, the build process takes around
02:238 weeks.
02:24We start off with the computer model of the chassis. All the tubing is laser cut, all
02:29the sheet metal is laser cut. By the chassis it gets made, it goes to powder coat, the
02:34body gets made at about the same time. The body is all in one piece, so it's very, very
02:38strong all by itself.
02:39After we're done with the assembly, it goes out for alignment. We like to custom and do
02:43all the testing, because we feel like this way they feel more attached to the car.
02:47We take them and the car to a track, and we just carefully warm it up, carefully lap it
02:53slowly, and keep checking it, and lap it faster and faster and faster with a race driver to
02:58help, to train the customer how to drive it properly, and by the end of the day the car
03:03is fully seated and broken in, the driver is fully trained, and after that we put the
03:07car in paint, and then interior. At that point the car is back here, we have one final check
03:12over again, make sure everything is how we want it, we reassemble it, and we ship it
03:17to the customer.
03:18But aside from its incredible performance, the most rewarding part about designing the
03:23car is the reaction it gets from others.
03:25It's done a lot of things that I wouldn't do in a regular car. It's won races, it's
03:30jumped bridges in Mexico, it's been in movies, it's been off road.
03:35The main thing what it does, that most every other car I've been around doesn't do,
03:39is it stops traffic everywhere it goes. Everyone wants to talk about it. If you go to the gas
03:44station, it'll take an hour. It just, everywhere you get near you it wants to talk about the
03:49car. Everywhere you go it makes people smile.
03:52Nobody's intimidated by it, nobody's threatened by it, they're just happy to see it and they
03:56want to talk about it.
