Meet the Deus Vayanne: The All-Electric Hypercar Crown Jewel of the New York Auto Show

Meet the Deus Vayanne, and its Austrian creators are very pleased to meet you. Where lots of startup EV companies (including VinFast, just a couple of hundred paces across the auto show floor) bring a whole range of cars to a show right before a brand debut, Deus only needs one prototype to make an impact. The Vayanne, as it's called, is one of the most interesting automotive collaborations between EU Nations that doesn't involve the F-35 Lightning or the Eurofighter.

This quip about fighter jets fits with a car of the Vayanne's mystique. There's a sense on first impressions that the slippery body and smooth, non-angular curves present in the car's construction could cut through the air in the same fashion the fuselage of a Eurofighter does, albeit as more of a wedge shape than a pointed arrow like the fighter.

There's a noticeable lack of aero present with at least this prototype Deus Vayanne. Heaven only knows how it will look when the design team shows us the production product. Rest assured, this design team is more qualified to design automobiles than most of us are to do our day jobs.

It's courtesy of Italdesign Giugiaro, the same sculptors and craftsmen that brought us the Volkswagen Scirocco, Alfa Romeo Alfasud, and the Maserati MC-12, among a slew of famous names we could not encapsulate in an expedient matter. What matters is this.

The bold, overtly Italian styling cues in the Deus Vayanne are very much not a coincidence. With a wicked pearl-white paint color on offer with the prototype, we can't wait to see how the car looks in more bold colors.

As for the engineering bits not serviced by a design team, it's been entrusted to Williams Advanced Engineering. An offshoot of the very same Formula One engineering consultant team that helped to develop some of the craziest and most well-designed racing cars in history. With a proprietary battery EV design on tap, Williams engineers claim a power figure somewhere in the 2,200hp range will be attainable on production variants.

Now, since insane levels of power like that usually can't be contextualized in automotive terms, here's a fun fact for you. A Pratt & Whitney R-2800-8 Double Wasp engine from a Second World War F4U Corsair produced 2,000 horsepower flat.

Today, this battery EV road roaming prototype produces a full 200 horses more. Further still, the Double Wasp weighed about as much as the entire Deus Vayann, sans driver and passenger. It should be good for a zero to 60 sprint in the low two-second range.

Opening the driver's side door of this remarkable prototype reveals an interior that certainly fits the pantomime and the occasion that its exterior does. Plush synthetic leather, a TFT display where the gauge cluster should be, and the lack of a transmission tunnel make for an interior space that's remarkably different from hypercars of old. Yet, we have a sense that as years go by, most, if not all, expensive hypercar interiors will start to take the same shape.

Admittedly, we're more than a little hesitant to sing the praises of a car that hasn't even been registered road legal yet. But come on, just look at the thing! Sure, it's not quite the pin-up darling that, say, an old Lamborghini might be.

But at this significantly reduced brand capacity at this year's New York Auto Show, we're convinced that this is one of the prettiest cars on the entire showroom floor. Production of up to 100 models of the Deus Vayanne is due to commence in 2025.

Be sure it sells in a price range that'd be a steal for anything other than the very high six-figure price range. Trust us when we say we're giddy with excitement, and that's just one car in an entire convention center.

Check back for more coverage from the 2022 New York International Auto Show right here on autoevolution.