The Carbon E7 was an attempt to build a specialist police/lsw enforcement vehicle from the ground up, rather than modifying an existing vehicle.
The E7 was a futuristic-looking 4-door sedan that promised to be more fuel efficient than traditional passenger-car-based police cars, and it was also engineered to be much less expensive to operate over time, thus lowering ongoing fleet-upkeep costs.
The E7 was built on a space frame chassis and was capable of with standing a 120 km/h (75mph) rear impact hit, while the front doors and dashboard offer ballistic protection. Other features included integrated nudge bumpers, shotgun mounts, rear-hinged rear doors to facilitate ingress and egress of prisoners, heads up display, weapons of mass-destruction threat detector, 360-degree exterior surveillance, Infrared system and an automatic license-plate recognition system. The E7 was to be powered by BMW’s 3.0-litre inline six-cylinder diesel engine and coupled to a 6-speed automatic transmission.
The Carbon Motors Corporation applied for $310 million in Department of Energy loans to get production started, but this was refused, which resulted in the company going out of business before building any production-spec vehicles.
The lone prototype was sold at auction in 2014 to an Indiana collector for $74,000.