Tiny UK manufacturer Ariel has proven itself rather competent at building most excellent skeletal lightweight and utterly, mentally, fast cars, such as the Atom.
It gets prodigious performance in the time-honoured way of jamming powerful engines into ridiculously light cars, so when it turned its attention to something more off-roadish, things were very promising indeed.
And so it turned out, as the the Ariel Nomad is said to be rather excellent fun off the sealed stuff.
But now Ariel has decided to up the fun factor by offering a supercharged option.
The blower added to the Nomad’s 2.4-litre Honda engine will pump out 216kW and 340Nm and add around $13,000 to the $68,000 starting price. Given it will propel the tiny off-roader to 96km/h in a frankly silly 3.4 seconds, the Good Oil can see the value in it.
Crunching the numbers
19 PEOPLE
The number of employees at the Ariel Motor Company
100 CARS
The number of cars produced annually by the Ariel Motor Company
2 CARS
The number of production cars faster than an Ariel Atom 500
1.6 m DOLLARS
The approximate price difference between the Ariel Atom 500 and the Porsche 918
This story originally appeared as part of Saturday's The Good Oil.