Maltese company unveils commercial electric sports car prototype

Malta-based Silex Power unveiled last week a high-performace three-wheel electric sports car, codenamed Valene Black Mamba, a technologically-advanced vehicle that offers unrivalled performance, safety, looks and a truly unique driving experience.

Silex Power had been working on the project for the past few years and the Valene Black Mamba was touted as the company’s first electric vehicle.

The vehicle is a superlight sports car aimed at performance users and it offers exceptional handling and traction control.

The design of the Black Mamba has been engineered to be as simple as possible, so as to make the vehicle extremely reliable and maintenance free.

The vehicle comes with an all-electric drive train, featuring in-hub rear wheel electric motors with powers ranging from 80kW up to 600kW; all the electronic components are at the rear of the vehicle.

It includes an on-board charger featuring a COMBO-2 connector, that can accept both AC and DC chargers. With battery packs available in 15kWh, 30kWh and 50kWh packages, the vehicle has an autonomy that ranges from 180km all the way up to 500km on a single charge.

Thanks to the battery design, the owner can fully charge the 50kWh battery pack in 1 hour using 50kW DC chargers, and the 15kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes.

The Black Mamba will also be HyperCharging compatible, with charging times under 5 minutes for all battery sizes.

Thanks to its streamlined sleek design, the Black Mamba has been aerodynamically optimised to offer minimal air resistance, low uplift and high down-force at increasing speeds. This delivers better road holding under the high-performance driving conditions for which the car is designed.

The aerodynamics of the vehicle also allow passive cooling of the battery pack and the electric motor via the vent on top of the vehicle, which draws air at high speed cooling directly the battery/electronics compartments. No fans are necessary during vehicle operation, thus increasing the overall vehicle reliability.

Driver and passenger safety have been the company’s priority throughout the design of the vehicle; the Black Mamba is built using strong seamless steel tubing, providing a strong protective shell for its occupants.

The unique safety position places the driver and passenger legs well behind the front axle, reducing significantly the chance of injury in a frontal collision. The car was also designed with a very low centre of gravity, so as to enhance its stability. Roll bars installed behind the seats reduce the chance of injury in the highly improbable eventuality of a rollover.

The Valene Black Mamba is a fully digital vehicle, sporting the most advanced multimedia systems to date.

The car is smartphone activated with a three-tier user identification; the interface is simple and highly intuitive. The Valene Black Mamba will also be one of the first production cars to offer the Clarion Full Digital Sound System as an option. Full digital signal transfer from a digital source enables direct input of high-quality audio sources to the speakers without worrying about sound deterioration.

Silex is now accepting pre-orders for the vehicles, via a form on the Valene Motors website. When pre-ordering, the client does not pay any deposit but will join the list of customers who will receive the Black Mamba once it is commercially available in 2017.

All pre-orders can be cancelled without any commitment. Once the company is ready to start confirming orders, the clients will be contacted individually, and at that time they will chose if they want to proceed with the order or not.

The first 50 pre-orders will also receive a free sound system upgrade to the Clarion Full Digital system, normally valued at € 3,000.

Pricing for the vehicles starts from € 35,000.