Photo: Facebook screenshot
This end of this Nurburgring season is extremely busy and you'll never guess which company jumped the Nordschleife testing bandwagon. That's because we're talking about Chinese automaker NextEV, which brought its electron juice-powered hypercar to the Ring earlier this week.
The monster EV, which the rumor mill sees delivering 1,360 hp, has been spotted on the infamous German track and we can now bring you a piece of footage showing the contraption thanks to Green Hell-obsessed blog BridgeToGantry (BTG).
The electric hypercar hasn't gone into maximum attack mode yet. Instead, we've seen the machine engaging in activities such as getting filmed using a dedicated camera car.
Speaking of flying laps, if NextEV were to challenger the Nurburgring's EV record, the beast would need to be faster than 7:22, a time set by Toyota Motorsport.
However, we're dealing with a record that comes from the EV P002 racecar, which was manhandled by Jochen Krumbach earlier this year, so this isn't a road car lap.
In fact, the Nurburgring road EV lap record is a gray area at the moment, as things in this area are even less clear than in the case of combustion engine records, which see every carmaker playing by its own rules.
Returning to NextEV, the Chinese automaker's Nurburgring arrival is just one of the efforts the company has done this fall. For instance, the carmaker has recently inaugurated its North America headquarters.
And the 85,000 square-foot will house a workforce of 400, including Jamie Carlson. The firmware engineer worked on the Tesla Autopilot feature since the system's inception, while subsequently joining Apple. Nothing is official, but now that the tech giant has scaled down its car-building ambitions, Carlson is said to have joined NextEV.
So while this prototype's Ring run may be all silent, it seems like it's worth listening to.
The electric hypercar hasn't gone into maximum attack mode yet. Instead, we've seen the machine engaging in activities such as getting filmed using a dedicated camera car.
Speaking of flying laps, if NextEV were to challenger the Nurburgring's EV record, the beast would need to be faster than 7:22, a time set by Toyota Motorsport.
However, we're dealing with a record that comes from the EV P002 racecar, which was manhandled by Jochen Krumbach earlier this year, so this isn't a road car lap.
In fact, the Nurburgring road EV lap record is a gray area at the moment, as things in this area are even less clear than in the case of combustion engine records, which see every carmaker playing by its own rules.
Returning to NextEV, the Chinese automaker's Nurburgring arrival is just one of the efforts the company has done this fall. For instance, the carmaker has recently inaugurated its North America headquarters.
And the 85,000 square-foot will house a workforce of 400, including Jamie Carlson. The firmware engineer worked on the Tesla Autopilot feature since the system's inception, while subsequently joining Apple. Nothing is official, but now that the tech giant has scaled down its car-building ambitions, Carlson is said to have joined NextEV.
So while this prototype's Ring run may be all silent, it seems like it's worth listening to.
Google News