The National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is out to change the perception of electric vehicles (EVs).

"EVs are more than glorified golf carts," says Chip Gribben, the NEDRA's PR Director. "Our whole mantra has been to dispel the myth that EVs are slow and we have been pretty successful."

Founded in 1997, NEDRA organizes drag racing competitions to show off the speed that vehicles powered by electricity can reach. As interest in electric vehicles has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of NEDRA's drag racing competitions.

This isn't only reflected by growing crowds. Gribben cites major sponsorship deals and notes that several NEDRA drivers have begun getting sponsorship from battery companies. NEDRA was also recently invited to the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series in July. "The fact that we have been invited means that the racing community is beginning to take a serious look at electric drag racing and NEDRA," he says.

Check out some videos of electric vehicles burning rubber at various NEDRA competitions below.

In last September's competition, the "KillaCycle" set a new NEDRA record by going a quarter of a mile in 7.864 seconds (reaching 169 miles per hour).

At the same competition, another electric bike, the ElectroCat, set a new NEDRA record for a 48-volt street-legal motorcycle by an eighth of a mile in 13.24 seconds (reaching 52.97 miles per hour).

The video above shows a Tesla roadster racing an in OBS junior dragster in a competition held earlier this year.

In this race, a Tesla roadster goes up against an electrified 1972 Datsun 1200, called White Zombie.

In this clip another electric drag bike, AGNS, makes a run.

Credit: Lauren Rugani

At today's second annual EurekaFest, top high-school innovators from around the country gathered at MIT to demonstrate their inventions. One of the most notable was a motorcycle designed to be both safer and greener than the average 'cycle: it's electrically powered and built with an enclosure fitted with compressible brackets--"crush zones"--in case of a collision.

The motorcycle operates on five lithium-ion batteries and can recharge in three hours from a standard wall outlet. It weighs only about 220 pounds and is designed with a low center of gravity for stability. It can reach about 60 miles per hour and can go 40 miles without a recharge, which can be done onboard. The first prototype cost around $12,000 to build, but the team that invented it, from Saint Thomas Academy, in Minnesota, expects that subsequent models will be about half the price, since part of the cost was designing and developing custom molds.

This year's $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, around which EurekaFest is organized, will be presented tonight to Joseph DeSimone, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has done work developing polymers for medicine, particularly drug delivery, and green manufacturing. Martin Fisher, CEO of KickStart, won the $100,000 award for sustainability research for his work on human-powered irrigation pumps.