Of the many unusual and innovative vehicles on display at the first Symposium on Low Pollution Power Systems Development in 1973 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it appeared that just three were functional enough to provide rides around the parking lot for the besuited attendees. While two of those three came from General Motors, the third, the Exide Battery Sundancer, came from a former race wrench who built some of the most powerful American cars to compete in professional racing and had by then already been profiled in the February 1972 issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

Though the article states that Bob McKee's Sundancer (here called the McKee Mark 16 Electric Commuter) came about when the business of building endurance race cars began to dry up in the late 1960s, McKee said he was actually rather busy at the time. Instead, the idea for the Sundancer came directly from Exide executives, who called up McKee in about 1968 and asked him to build them an electric car, presumably to allow Exide to sell more batteries.

Building on his race car fabrication experience, McKee hit upon the idea of using a backbone chassis in an electric car not only for strength and simplicity, but also as a place to store the heavy battery pack. As McKee argued in his 1972 patent application for the design of the car (3,983,952), the backbone design results in a low center of gravity as well as a low profile for reduced wind resistance, the latter important for extending the range of the car. And by loading the batteries onto a slide-out tray, maintenance is made simple and drained batteries can then be easily swapped out for freshly charged batteries.

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