Car Enthusiast is a serious motoring editorial agency, so we'd never resort to puerile chuckling at a Swiss car maker's loose grasp of the Queen's English, no matter hilarious it might be.

I mean, if you find something funny about the sentence 'where ultimate performances meet Guinness-efficiency', well, you must be Xenophobic. But that's what the LAMPO does. Or maybe that's what fuel it uses? It's not too clear.

Whatever, Swiss maker Protoscar, the self proclaimed 'Minergie-architect', has unveiled the LAMPO, so called because the names 'Febbari' and 'Maserapi' were taken, we think. Unsurprisingly, it's an electric supercar in the vein of the Tesla - that much is obvious by looking at the thing - and it emits, of course, zero emissions at the tailpipe.

Swisslish jokes aside, from what we can glean from the press release, the LAMPO does offer a unique and promising advantage over your common or garden electric supercar. We think you can plug it in next to the kettle in your house, and after you have, it'll do 125-miles or so on the charge. How many times your kettle will boil during the time it takes to charge is unclear - but the car can 'detect' if an 'accelerated 7kW booster charge can be supplied by the electric network. That sounds like it can charge quickly from a specific energy source.

That source, a power supply from 'amorphous silicon solar cells', will make the LAMPO the cleanest cradle-to-grave sportscar there ever was - claims Protoscar. The electric car supposedly uses its energy three times as efficiently as a petrol or diesel engine uses fuel - energy that is, of course, cleaner than fossil fuels in the first place.

So how does it perform? Like an electric sportscar, really. Two electric motors (one at the front, the other at the back) produce 268bhp combined and 325lb.ft of twist, all of which comes at exactly zero rpm. There are no performance stats as yet, as CGI renderings tend not to perform too well for the stop watch, but we are assured a working model will appear at Oslo's EVS-24 zero-emission rally in May this year. You'll see it on the show stands at Geneva before that in March, too. Hopefully it'll be brilliant.

Mark Nichol - 7 Jan 2009