This Wild 1800-HP Electric Hypercar Is One Step Closer to Production

From Road & Track

The Dendrobium D-1 started out as electric sport car concept sketched up by Singaporean product design company Vanda Electrics in the mid-1990s. Roughly two decades later, in 2016, those sketches were presented to Williams Advanced Engineering, who created a working show car for Vanda just in time for the 2017 Geneva Motor Show. There, the Singaporean team managed to secure a number of advanced orders with their flashy concept, and so that began the mission of putting the D-1 into production by 2020.

Now, the D-1 project took another step forward, setting up its base in the UK as the new company Dendrobium Automotive Limited. Its CEO is Nigel Gordon-Stewart, who used to be responsible for the sales and marketing of the McLaren F1 before landing at Lamborghini, where he worked on the re-introduction of the Super Veloce line before moving to Lotus.

Now, Gordon-Stewart says Dendrobium intends the D-1 to be "a British engineering tour-de-force:"

The headline figures include 1800 horsepower (hello Rimac C_Two!) and 1475 ft.-lb. of torque, with a weight target of 3858 lbs. The relatively low mass is down to the car being made mostly of carbon fiber, advanced composites and lightweight alloys.

The Dendrobium dream team also includes Jens Sverdrup, who's name will be familiar from Koenigsegg and Rimac circles. What's for sure is that Jens knows all about how to market a hypercar, and wastes no time doing so:

To make the most of Britain's precious sunshine, the next prototype of the D-1 will debut at Salon Privé on the 30th of August, at the Blenheim Palace Cricket Pitch.

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