Chevy’s Electric eCOPO Camaro Is Made to Rule the Drag Strip

Punch “Tesla drag race vs” into YouTube, and you’re offered a panoply of ways to complete your search. You can watch one of Elon Musk’s electric cars face off with Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Dodge Hellcats, McLarens, Corvettes, and just about any supercar or muscle machine you can think of. These videos are much the same: Again and again, the instant torque of the EV’s motors smokes the gas belcher off the line, leaving nothing but the squeal of the tires ringing in the reddening ears of whoever’s watching its taillights pull away.

Today, Chevrolet unveiled its bid to keep up with the Muskses: It has electrified the Camaro. At the SEMA automotive parts and aftermarket mods show now underway in Las Vegas, the company revealed a battery-powered version of the iconic muscle car so closely associated with American muscle, V8 engines, booming exhausts, and—above all—tradition. It’s called the eCOPO Camaro, an apt spin on this new offering from the company’s COPO high-performance racing division.

Buy into the heresy, though, and you get more than 700 horsepower and 600 pound-feet of torque from the two 300 pound-feet torque motor assemblies, bolted together and mated to a conventional racing transmission heavy duty enough to relay all that torque to the solid rear axle. Chevy says that should be good for quarter-mile times in at least the 9-second range, but its engineers are still running final tests. For reference, the 2017 COPO Camaro, shown a year ago in the same liquidy metallic blue paint, makes 470 horsepower from a 7-liter engine, and can put up a 9.2 second quarter-mile time. Still, showing an electric car with that badge, even as a concept, is likely to get mixed reactions from hardcore fans.

“That’s me,” says Russ O’Blenes, director of performance variants parts and motorsports at GM, and proud owner of a barn full of big-block Chevys. “For 25 years I did race motors for GM, and that’s all I ever did.” But he has accepted the charge.

“There’s sounds, there’s smells, there’s that stuff that we’re used to,” he says. Stuff that’s going away, but in exchange for cleaner, more reliable racers. Electric motors aren’t just quicker, O’Blenes says, they’ll go much longer between rebuilds than internal combustion engines usually do. “I think there’ll be some polarization to start, but the reality is it’s really an incredible thing.” He sees this vehicle as a continuation of the aims of the COPO program, which goes back to 1969: to push performance limits.