I’ll be honest I hadn’t but then I don’t spend a lot of time surfing the net for news about electric cars. And it seems of course that the main media outlets can’t be bothered either. So a little known Canadian electric car maker, Zenn, is about to become a global player thanks to the technology of EEStor, a Texas based tech firm that have developed a revolutionary super capacitor.

Look out Toyota, Honda and all other hybrid jokers, this Electrical Energy Storage Unit, EESU for short, so outperforms any chemical battery on the market today it takes your breath away. It is the Holy Grail of energy storage without the use of any toxic materials. Unaffected by temperature extremes, almost 0 storage trickle loss this EESU not only has applications for automobiles but any industry where energy storage is required.

EEStor’s patents reveal objectives that are nothing short of ‘replacing the electro-chemical battery’ in almost every application and ultimately eradicating the internal combustion engine. A proposed 300 pound 52 KWH EESU would have a projected charging time of 3-6 minutes. It could power a mid-size sedan for several hundred miles at highway speeds.

Pie in the sky? Not according to some big and respected names: As a testament to the viability of this venture in energy storage, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – a leading venture capital company who were early investors in Google™®, Amazon.com® and Palm® also made an investment in EEStor. It should also be noted that Nobel laureate Al Gore, a fan of the ZENN, has recently joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner.

There is an enormous amount of interest regarding this technology, especially given that Lockheed Martin has secured an exclusive technology agreement to use EEStor’s EESU in military and homeland security applications and Morton L. Topfer, a former Vice Chairman of Dell Computer Corporation has joined EEStor’s Board of Directors. Fortune Small Business Magazine has identified EEStor and Zenn as one of “The Disruptors” to watch in the coming year.

Zenn are already retailing electric cars throughout Canada and the US using conventional battery technology and hope to have an EESU based vehicle for sale by the end of 2009. So far EEStor are on target to deliver the proposed unit and have hit all development targets set by Zenn or exceeded them so far.

For further information take a look at Zenn’s website: http://www.zenncars.com/