Yahoo Autos The Vanda Dendrobium EV Hypercar Is a Go for 2020
If you have a whole lot of money, one of the world's leading engineering groups will help you out with your supercar dreams. Take the Lykan Hypersport, Dom Toretto's favorite mid-engined car, for instance.
Only seven of these Lebanese wonders were built by W Motors, a United Arab Emirates based company, yet most of the engineering work was done by Rimac in Croatia. Rimac knows a thing or two about limited production, having stopped the Concept One after just eight units, seven of which remain on the road today. No problem though, because their next car will make it over 200 units sometime after 2019, priced at the $1.9 million level.
When it comes to Williams Advanced Engineering, the last time I had the opportunity to floor anything built by them, I was strapped into an orange Jaguar C-X75, except it had a spaceframe with a supercharged V8 bolted in the middle instead of the hybrid tech, as it was one of the Bond stunt cars made for Spectre. But the team at Williams' engineering division is way past internal combustion. Being the sole battery supplier of Formula E and the team behind Nissan's EV prototypes, they know a thing or two about high density cells, as well as carbon fiber chassis, aerodynamics and suspension design. And so when a Singaporean startup needed a technological partner to create a striking halo car, Williams was a natural fit.
Vanda Electrics is currently in the process of figuring out where it wants to land in the EV world. Having designed both an electric scooter and a lightweight commercial truck, their hypercar concept named after the dendrobium flower, a genus of orchids native to Singapore, debuted at the Geneva Motor Show as a dynamic concept. At that point, it wasn't certain if it could advance further from that stage. But since a few early adopter billionaires surprised Vanda with a number of advanced orders, the project is set to become reality by 2020.
With a target weight of 3860 lbs, a top speed in excess of 200 mph, a 0-60 sprint in 2.7 seconds and an automatic roof and door mechanism, which opens them in a synchronized manner (the Koenigsegg Regera says hi!), the Dendrobium wants to be another player in the game started by Rimac.
And since the car is set to feature two inboard-mounted electric motors per axle, with a single-speed gearbox and differential at the front and a multi-speed gearbox and differential at the rear, only time will tell if Williams also intends to develop a torque vectoring system similar to the one introduced by the Concept One. Either way, Rimac will be hard to catch in this game, especially knowing that they should have their second model on the market by the time Vanda is done with its first.
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