<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Next to the trailer, there were what at first glance appeared to be two Ariel Atoms basking in the sun at Zolder Circuit in Belgium. Sportbikes raced by on the track behind them; in front of the cars, a large parking lot full of cones. Next to the cars, helmets. I looked at the closer Atom and thought that maybe the helmet would come in handy. That&amp;#039;s because one of these things is not like the others. The red Atom is stock; its cousin has been hacked apart and reimagined by Ben Bowlby, creator of the DeltaWing and Nissan&amp;#039;s ZEOD RC sports car. Its 63-inch front track has been reduced to a laughable 23.5 inches, and the tiny 155/60R-15 tires looked like they belonged on an old air-cooled Beetle. Actually, that&amp;#039;s not far off the mark.  How would they compare? I hit the autocross course, and this is what I found out.  1. This mule was built for the executives This isn&amp;#039;t really an engineering mule. It was built from a readily-available off-the-shelf vehicle as a proof of concept. Its mission was to convince skeptical Japanese executives at Nissan that their first impressions of the idea were as wrong-headed as my own. They did this by letting them flog the piss out of both cars on an autocross course. The rest is history: The BladeGlider is coming in 2017 as a production model.   2. Of course it understeers That&amp;#039;s probably the first thing you thought when you looked at the improbable setup. And yes, it does plow something fierce, when you hit a corner too hot, but so does the regular Atom. But the narrow front track reduces tire loading in a corner and makes it easier to rotate the rear. And interestingly, it felt much more stable over rough sections.   3. Weight balance is key More than anything else, the ZEOD RC and DeltaWing programs showed Nissan that weight balance was the magic bullet. Too much weight over the front, and the understeer went from nominal but acceptable to undriveable. The magic ratio is 30/70; to achieve this, the wheelbase was extended. In production, the real BladeGlider will undoubtedly be rear-engined. Also, it&amp;#039;ll be a three-seater, just like the BladeGlider concept. Think McLaren F1. Having two passengers beside and slightly behind the driver will help with weight balance, too.   4. Don&amp;#039;t expect the powertrain to resemble this Atom&amp;#039;s Just because this Atom had a 2-liter Honda transverse-four out back, don&amp;#039;t assume that the production BladeGlider will have anything close to that. One of the goals of the ZEOD RC, and in turn, the BladeGlider, is to create a sports car that can benefit from an electric (or partially electric) drivetrain. Reducing front drag and keeping overall weight down is key for optimizing the car&amp;#039;s battery requirements. Nissan engineers found that after a certain-sized battery, the advantages didn&amp;#039;t scale up: More power required more weight from a larger battery. You can be assured that they&amp;#039;re going to use the smallest possible battery and motor combination in the BladeGlider that will produce adequate performance; whether it will be coupled to a tiny gas engine like the ZEOD RC hasn&amp;#039;t been announced.   5. The most important thing is that it&amp;#039;s a lot of fun So what was it actually like to blast through an unfamiliar cone course in a hacked-up Ariel with tiny front tires spaced less than two feet apart? I swapped between the original Atom and the Nissan mule as many times as I could stand to contort myself into the seats, and I preferred the narrow-wheeled version. First of all, you can&amp;#039;t argue with a central seating position for pure selfish driving enjoyment. It was also easier to push through the scrub and induce oversteer, and the clever rear suspension (whose geometry is cribbed from the ZEOD RC) made it surprisingly stable. I thought of it as a bit of self-correction, as if the overall suspension design was aiming to return the car to a neutral situation\u2014clever and reassuring in a car with absolutely no driver&amp;#039;s aids to speak of.  The steering was slightly heavier, and darty, but also extremely precise. I was just as aggressive in the mule as I was in the regular Atom, and while I had to feather the pedal and hack at the wheel in different proportions, the overall result was damn close. The performance envelope isn&amp;#039;t compromised, as near as I could tell, it was just different. And I like different. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/first-drives/reviews/a8198/5-things-nissan-bladeglider-mule/>