An Electric Car Unlike Any Other

The idea for the Tango's mix of car and motorcycle attributes came to Rick Woodbury decades ago while crawling in L.A.’s highway gridlock. He noticed that there was only one person in almost every car and decided that doubling the road capacity for all of those single occupants by using lanes and cars half as wide as normal would solve the gridlock problem, not to mention reduce pollution and fuel consumption. "The government could just draw a line down an already existing lane and make two Tango-size lanes," he said. The T600 is designed to have more clearance on either side of it in a six-foot-wide lane than a tractor-trailer does in existing 12-foot lanes.

+ enlarge image  |  view slideshow > George Clooney bought Commuter Cars' first Tango T600 electric vehicle.

George Clooney bought the first T600 last fall during production of Ocean’s Twelve after reading about it in a magazine. At publication time, two others were being built for clients whose names Woodbury wouldn't disclose.

In order to crash-test and get two less-expensive, more basic models into production — called the T100 and T200, which should retail for $18,700 and $39,900, respectively — the Woodburys are looking for a $50 million infusion to create full-fledged engineering and production facilities. To prove there's a viable market to would-be investors, they're using the Commuter Cars website to secure fully refundable deposits for future Tangos: $10,000 for the T600, $1,000 for the T200 and $500 for the T100. So far, they've amassed 75 deposits for Tangos since they began taking orders online a couple of years ago.

The seminal T600, which seats two in one row, would seem to hold a particular appeal to residents of L.A., where "lane-splitting" — driving down lane dividers in backed-up traffic — is legal. More than half (57 percent) of the 280 people that Woodbury informally polled at a recent L.A. auto show said that they would drive a Tango in order to avoid traffic jams.

Usually lane-splitting is reserved for motorcycles, but the T600 is narrow enough to fit between two lanes of cars. In fact, at 39 inches wide, it's actually narrower than Honda's beefiest cruiser motorcycle, the Gold Wing, which is 44 inches wide. Another advantage to the slender footprint is that the Tango can be parked in small spaces usually reserved for motorcycles, including perpendicular to the curb, where laws allow.