England-based AC Cars announced an electric version of the Cobra in July 2020. Over a year later, it detailed a new model based on the Ace and available with an electric drivetrain that offers better acceleration and more range.
Don’t worry if you can’t quite tell the Cobra and the Ace apart: the former was an evolution of the latter powered by a V8 engine, so they looked a lot alike when viewed from the outside. The resemblance hasn’t waned in 2021, and the two roadsters share more than a passing resemblance. Some of the key styling cues that differentiate the Ace from the Cobra are a specific front end with a bigger grille, fenders without vents, and wheel arches without flares.
Power for the Ace comes from an electric motor that draws electricity from a 38-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack to develop 308 horsepower and up to 368 pound-feet of torque, though continuous torque checks in at 184. AC says that’s enough power for a 5.5-second sprint from zero to 62 mph, and it quotes a 200-mile driving range.
There’s no word on what effect the battery pack has on handling, though we know the electric Ace weighs about 2,300 pounds. That’s a few hundred pounds more than the original Ace, which was built from 1954 to 1962. For context, the electric Cobra announced in 2020 weighs 2,755 pounds due to a 54-kilowatt-hour battery pack.
AC will build 37 units of the Ace RS Electric Founders Edition, and it priced each one at £129,500, a sum which represents about $179,900 at the current conversion rate — that’s about $84,000 more than an authentic fiberglass-bodied Shelby 289 Street Cobra without an engine and transmission, and roughly on par with an aluminum-bodied car. Each Ace RS will be built by hand in England, and customer deliveries are scheduled to start in late 2022.