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This incredible hand-built supercar can go from 0 to 60 at 3 seconds and can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour
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But it will cost you between 96 and $128,000 to buy one
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It's exciting. It's easy to drive. It gives you a lot of confidence
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It inspires some really daring maneuvers and crafts, but it's just fun
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Everyone that gets out of it has a huge smile on everything. The Lucre was the brainchild of Luke Richards
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and he set up his California-based boutique car company to manufacture it
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I first came up with the idea for the Luca car in 2005
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We got our first prototype in 2006. The job of the car is to be lightweight, high-performance, high-powered car
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The aim of his design was to combine the speed and power of an American muscle car
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with the maneuverability of the European sports car. My father told me you could either have a car that was fast in the straightaways
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or a car that was fast in the corners. Back then, the chimeras and the Mustangs were big horsepower and the lotuses
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and the European sports cars were lower horsepower Porsche. But lighter. Growing up in England and growing up in America, I kind of felt like I kind of had a passion
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for V8, Spadale's had a passion for lightweight sports cars. So I did what he said was impossible
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We made both in one. The lightweight body is made from carbon fiber
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But it's not just about how little weight there is. It's also about where it is
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Kept the car down around 2,000 pounds, even with the V8. And we made the car pretty stout
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We didn't skimp out on any of the safety or rigidity, because that's equally important
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We also made the car tail heavy, so the weight distribution is about 55 to the rear to the rear but this gives it a nice mid car feel It has a little bit of oversteer It likes to drive through corners It really easy to drive really friendly really difficult to spin
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I mean, really difficult to get out of control. And we've tried completely
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And it makes for a very high-performance car that's really easy to drive by a novice and we're professional
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Each lucre is built to order, and from start to finish, the build process takes around eight weeks
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eight weeks. You start off with the computer model of the chassis. All the tubing is laser cut
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All the sheet metal is laser cut. By the chassis gets made, it goes to powder coat. The body gets
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made at about the same time. The body's all one piece, so it's very, very strong all by itself
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After we're done with the assembly, it goes out for alignment. We like the customer and do all
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the testing because we feel like this way they feel more attached to their car. We take them
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and the car to the track, and we just carefully warm it up, carefully lap it. It's
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slowly and keep checking it and lap it faster and faster with a race driver to help to train
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the customer how to drive it properly. And by the end of the day, the car is fully seated and broken in
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The driver is fully trained. And after that, we put the car in paint and then interior
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At that point, the car is back here. We have one final checkover again, make sure everything is how we want it
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We reassemble it and we ship it to the customer. But aside from its incredible performance, the most rewarding part about designing the car
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is the reaction it gets from others. I've done a lot of things that I wouldn't do in a regular car
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It's won races, it's jumping bridges in Mexico, it's been off-road. The main thing what it does is that a lot of
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most every other car I've been around doesn't do is it stops traffic everywhere it goes
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Everyone wants to talk about it. If you go to the gas station, it'll take an hour
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It's just everywhere you get, it gets near you want to talk about the car. Everywhere you go, it makes people smile
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Nobody's intimidated by it. Nobody's threatened by it. They're just happy to see it and they want to talk about it