In case people start getting confused which startup automaker is building which performance electric car, I’d like all of you to put you attention on NextEV and its Nio EP9 electric hypercar. The car’s specs alone are worth headlines since it packs 1,341 horsepower and a staggering 4,671 pound-feet of torque, but the Nio EP9 didn’t make today’s headlines because of that. It made the headlines because it used all of that power to record a 7:05.12-minute lap time around the Nurburgring, becoming the fastest ever electric car to navigate around the 12.9-mile race track.
To put that in perspective, the Nio EP9’s lap time puts it fifth overall among street-legal, production cars, outpacing the Nissan GT-R Nismo by over three seconds. To be clear though, the EP9 is not yet an actual production car so the GTR’s lap time of 7:08.69 can still sit pretty in that fifth place spot. But rest assured, the pace that the EP9 exhibited as it ran roughshod over the ‘Ring points to what the hypercar is fully capable of when it’s unleashed with no restrictions.
At the very least, it’s slowly piling up record lap times in some of the world’s most famous racing tracks, including the Paul Ricard circuit in Marseille, France, where it set a lap time of 1:52.78, a record for an electric car at the world famous circuit.
Beyond it’s obnoxiously high output — it technically generates 1 megawatt of power, same as the Koenigsegg One:1 — the EP9 can also generate a mind-boggling 17,701 pound-feet of torque of downforce when it’s doing 149 mph, which, according to NextEV, is two times the amount of downforce generated by a Formula One race car. All together, the electric hypercar is capable of sprinting from 0 to 62 mph in just 2.7 seconds and 0 to 124 mph in just 7.1 seconds, to go with a top speed of 195 mph. The last figure is a bit of letdown compared to some of today’s supercars, but considering everything else that it can do, I doubt people will be upset that it can’t break 200 mph, especially when they realize just how legitimately scary that feeling would be for a car that can pull out that much torque out of its four electric motors.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
from Top Speed http://ift.tt/2gk8yyd
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