Detroit Electrified

Question: What's visually stimulating, looks spectacularly sexy in any setting, and plans to ride hard about sometime next year (or the year after), surging forth with heart-pumping/nose-bleed inducing, surges of electrical 'impulses' ?

Yes, that's right, wow you guys are good ... Of course it's gotta be none other than the work of art on wheels (aka the Audi E-Tron EV concept car) currently taking this year's Detroit auto show by storm .

Sleek in design, forward thinking in (green) innovation, and perhaps one of the sexiest of the new EV cars set to take stage come sometime late 2011/early 2012.

The Audi E-Tron is somewhat of a special case in that not only is it a concept design currently being displayed over in Detroit... but it's also set to go into preliminary production sometime later this year (apparently Audi's serious about bringing this one to the market ). The car itself will undoubtedly be part of the first generation of electric vehicles set to take to the streets this decade... so perhaps that's already a buyer's beware red-flag right there considering the foward leap in technology. Oh, and I won't bother bringing up the price... I think the term 'steep' might suffice in this case.

That said, the model itself is indeed a thing of beauty. Perhaps a toy for the 'better off than I' crowd (aka preliminary guinea pig sector of the population), but I still enjoy the visual eye-candy Audi's designers came up with. You can check out more on the E-tron specs and speculation over at the NYTimes blog.