Zero to sixty. Horsepower per kilogram. Nürburgring lap times. All great ways of bench-racing cars in order to win arguments in the pub (or on an Internet forum). And if the latter is your go-to yardstick for performance, there's a new king of the electric vehicles in town: the NextEV Nio EP9.
NextEV is a Chinese EV maker, and it's going to launch a range of electric (and eventually autonomous) cars under the Nio brand (starting in China next year). As is now becoming the default (e.g., Faraday Future), instead of showing us a prototype production model, the company is making a splash with an EV supercar—the 194mph (313km/h) EP9—just six of which will be built.
The EP has been designed for the track-day enthusiast and so features rapidly swappable batteries. NextEV hasn't released the kWh rating for the batteries but says the range is 265 miles (426km) and that recharging takes 45 minutes (swapping the batteries for a fully charged set takes eight minutes apparently). The chassis is—as you'd expect—carbon fiber, and it has a motor-generator unit at each wheel, with a peak power output of 1,341hp/1MW and 1091 ft-lbs/1480 Nm of torque.
To prove the firm's engineering credentials, the EP9 recently spent some time testing at the Nürburgring, setting a new electric lap record on "the Green Hell" in the process. Previously, the fastest EV around the 12.9-mile (20.8km) track was Toyota's TMG EV P002 race car, which set a time of 7:22.329 in 2012. The Nio EP9 has shaved that down to just 7:05.120.
By contrast, there's no official time for a Tesla Model S, given that company's extreme disinterest in all things motorsport. Although there's a commonly held belief that a Model S can't even complete a lap of the 'ring (thanks to this Jalopnik article), that doesn't appear to be the case. The fastest Tesla lap we can find on YouTube is a little under nine minutes, although that is only a "bridge to gantry" time, set by a P85D on a rather busy track day in 2015.
Still, Tesla has bulging order books and an ever-growing model line, so we can't see the company attempting to wrestle this record away any time soon. Rimac, on the other hand...
reader comments
36