Can INDI EV Make an Electric Car?

• INDI EV, a Southern California startup, says it will have a production electric car in showrooms within two years using an adjustable air-ride suspension, all-wheel drive, and a 95-kWh battery.

• The main draw, however, will be a computer aimed at onboard gaming.

• Pricing will range from $45,000 to $65,000.

INDI EV is coming and will have a car in showrooms in less than two years, the company says.

Wait, what is INDI EV, you ask?

INDI EV is a startup carmaker headquartered in Southern California that is aiming to make an electric crossover called the INDI ONE. It will seat five and will be sized between the Tesla Model Y and Model X. It will ride on an adjustable air-ride suspension with all-wheel drive and be powered by a 95-kWh battery giving it a range of either 275 or “a little bit over 300 miles,” depending what part of the press material you read or whom you ask.

How is that different from Aptera, Fisker, Karma, Canoo, Faraday Future, Byton, and all the other EVs that all the other startups are claiming they’re going to make?

Gaming.

The execs at INDI EV seem to want to separate their product from the field at this very early stage by saying it has a “supercomputer” under the hood. They even named the supercomputer VIC, or Vehicle Integrated Computer.

“The INDI ONE is unique from other electric vehicles in the space thanks to its VIC (Vehicle Integrated Computer), the first ever in-vehicle integrated supercomputer,” says INDI EV.

VIC sits in the spot under the hood where the internal combustion engine would be on a more traditional car. You know that VIC is sitting in there because the hood has a glass window in it specifically placed there so you can see VIC. Now, what makes VIC a supercomputer? Here’s where we encounter what is sometimes referred to as “marketing hype.” If asked specifically, INDI EV will admit that the “supercomputer” is really a Windows PC with an i7 processor running an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. Ask any teenager and they’ll tell you something like, “Yeah, that’s a pretty good gaming setup.” Ask any supercomputer-using rocket scientist and they’ll tell you, “Get the heck outta here!”

Even Wikipedia will tell you that a supercomputer is exponentially bigger and far more powerful than a mere gaming computer meant to play Mario Kart:

“The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 10¹⁷ FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).”

So, INDI EV, that ain’t no supercomputer you got there.

If they’re wildly exaggerating about the computer, are they also wildly exaggerating about everything else? Well, maybe not. INDI EV’s founder is a video gaming entrepreneur so offering a gaming computer in the car would seem only natural.

“The idea from us at the beginning was, ‘How do we take this EV platform and do something more with it? What’s the next-generation usage?” asked head of product design Andre Hudson. “So we like to think that the next matrix of performance in the car is not going to be that horsepower, it’s not going to be the speed and the torque, it’s going to be the processing power, because you’re sitting on top of this high-voltage system which is allowing you to create this hardware set, this fundamental toolbox of digital components to not only let us offer a unique feature set with what you can do with that hardware, but also keep it open source and let people come in and create applications on top of it. And that is like a really totally different thinking for EVs.”