The 2012 Iconic AC Roadster was recently featured on Motortrend.com. Clearly the Iconic AC Roadster is no ordinary kit car. It represents a thorough reimagining of what the AC Cobra might have become with 50 years of continuous evolution. And while legally it is sold as a component car like all the other Cobra kit cars (to avoid design-killing features like airbags), this one uses virtually no recognizable parts. Company founder, Claudio Ballard, is an Italian-American inventor, the son of an electrical engineer and nephew of a Ferrari employee. After 35 years spent innovating primarily in the computer industry, he set out to build the supercar of his dreams. This quest led to a licensing partnership with AC Cars of England to return that venerable marque to our shores with a car made in Detroit. His development team has attracted top local talent, many of whom worked on Ford's GT supercar. Ballard's electronics background helped him design a new type of electrical architecture for the AC Roadster, known as VEEDIMS (Virtual Electrical Electronic Device Interface Management System). It's entirely Ethernet based, using simple cabling that distributes power, ground, and data directly to every system. There's no complex wiring harness or fuse box -- every system is digitally monitored and shut down if a fault or short occurs, logging the error for subsequent debugging. An optional 3G link can allow monitoring and system debugging on demand from the factory (serving as a showcase to sell VEEDIMS to OE manufacturers is clearly one of the Iconic AC Roadster's raisons d'etre). Out on the open autocross course set up on Ford's Dearborn Proving Ground the car hurtles toward each carefully placed chicane, evincing little or no dive, squat, or roll. For this exercise, all the adjustable suspension elements have been dialed toward understeer and to discourage anyone from assessing the Iconic AC Roadster's fitness as a Formula Drift ride, though clearly an imprudent prod of the billet-milled accelerator could probably loop the car at any moment. Read more on Motortrend.com