Hypercars! They’re the fastest, the wildest, the rarest, and the most expensive cars on the planet. Paganis! Koenigseggs! McLarens! Love them or hate them, you know the names. But I’m here to teach you about a few you haven’t heard of! Gear up for some hypercars and let’s go!
Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 – A Legend Reborn
Have you ever heard of the McLaren F1? Some argue that it was the first hypercar ever made. And the brain behind the build was a guy named Gordon Murray. Decades later, he decided that he was going to recreate the F1 recipe, but on his own terms, not McLaren’s. And thus, the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 was born.
The GMA T.50 incorporates a lot of what made the McLaren F1 so special, but pairs that with modern tech, and the result is truly a sight to behold. Gordon Murray is one of the best designers out there and the final form of the T.50 is a work of art. It has an elegantly sculpted exterior and a luxuriously equipped interior that you might notice looks a little different. That’s right, like the McLaren F1 and the Speedtail of today, the T.50 seats three people! And that is so cool on paper, but I’m sure is so so so impractical. But that’s exactly what hypercars are all about!
Now, I bet you’re thinking that it’ll have some fancy hybrid powertrain pushing out gobs of power paired with a trick transmission controlled by fancy gizmos and computers, but Gordon Murray is old-fashioned at heart. And so is his T.50 has a naturally-aspirated V12 that sits right behind the driver, which was designed by Cosworth with a couple of strict orders: make as much power as the original F1 at the minimum and make that V12 weigh less than the original F1 engine.
The result was an engine weighing 392 pounds that produced 654 horsepower and it revs up to a 12,100 RPM redline! The old F1 weighed 2,500 pounds, which is impressive, but the new T.50 is rumored to be less than 2,200 pounds! And, yeah, three seats in the car and three pedals control the gears, which means Gordon probably bought one of our “Save The Manuals” shirts.
The biggest difference between the old F1 and the T.50 is the active aerodynamics in the new car. A fan fitted to the rear of the car makes it look like it’s jet-powered, and it’s not just for looks. Spinning at up to 7,000 RPM, the fan increases downforce and reduces drag at the same time! Is it hokey? Is it cool? I can’t tell. Let me know what you think of the fan.
Sadly, they’re only making 100 units and they’ve all been sold, so good luck seeing one out in the wild. While the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50 is all about the past, the Nio EP9 is all about the future!
Nio EP9 – Track-Focused Future
Formula E. Whether you’ve heard about it or not, it’s the future of racing. Not only are the cars fully electric, but the races also take place in downtown city streets from London to New York City. Formula E is the future of motorsport. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that one of the manufacturers decides to build an all-out hypercar. Introducing the Nio EP9, a Formula E car for the streets.
Look, for a long time, when you’re talking hypercars and supercars, really only one metric matters: green hell lap times. And the EP9 set one hell of a scorcher with a time of 6 minutes and 45.9 seconds. The EP9 may be one of the new kings of the Nurburgring! To put that into perspective, that is faster than a Lamborghini Huracan Performante or a Porsche 911 GT2RS!
It’s fast. How fast you ask? The car produces one megawatt of power, and that’s equal to 1,341 horsepower! Not only does it produce that much power, but each wheel also has its own individual electric motor with a trick torque vectoring system that can move the power around to each specific wheel in order to get the most traction at all times. It’s like all-wheel drive but leveled up and perfected.
The tech magic doesn’t end there. Sure, lots of cars are fast on a track with a good race driver behind the wheel. But what if there wasn’t one? Like, what if there wasn’t a driver at all? Yeah, that’s right, the EP9 set an autonomous lap record at COTA. Not only did the EP9 set a sub-3-minute lap, but it also set a top speed record for an autonomous car at 160 miles per hour!
Alright, you guys might not be so excited about the electrified future, so let’s talk about something I know gets your turbos spinning. With 4 turbos and 16 cylinders, the Bugatti Centodieci is nothing to be messed with.
Bugatti Centodieci – Homage to the Future
Sure, you’ve heard of the Veyron and the Chiron, but I doubt you’ve ever heard of the Centodieci. Why? Because there are 450 Veyrons, scheduled to be 500 Chirons, and only 10 Centodiecis worldwide. Remember how I said the Nio EP9 had a megawatt of power? The Centodieci has more, 236 horsepower more!
And the Centodieci is all about numbers as “Centodieci” literally translates to 110, paying homage to its roots, the EB110. While the Centodieci has 77 horsepower over the Chiron, it surprisingly loses 25 miles per hour on the top end. But to call 236 miles per hour slow would be like saying that Brad’s facial expressions are “subtle.” Even though it’s slower at the top end than the Chiron, the Centodieci is faster accelerating from 0 to186 miles per hour, half a second faster! And, I mean, isn’t that way more important? Who’s even going to hit the top speed in their Bugatti?
But, all that power and exclusivity come at a cost. The Centodieci costs more than double a standard Chiron at $9 million! So, if you’re more of a budget buyer of hypercars, this next car might be for you: the Hispano Suiza Carmen.
Hispano Suiza Carmen – Class Can Haul Ass
The Hispano Suiza Carmen costs $2 million, so it’s not really budget. Hispano believes that they’ve found a brand new market, mixing the engineering of a hypercar and the design and luxury of the highest craftsmanship of past and present. While the design pays homage to a one-off concept car, the 1938 Hispano Suiza H6C Dubonnet Xenia, the engineering behind it is anything but old. The Carmen is sporting a full carbon fiber monocoque and a fully electric powertrain with over 1,000 horsepower!
While the Carmen is all about creating a new class of elegance and style paired with performance and luxury, the people at Hispano Suiza added a more hardcore package to the Carmen called the Boulogne edition. Decked out in full carbon fiber and fitted with copper accents, the Boulogne is a sight to behold. But it’s not just looks. It adds horsepower, stiffens the suspension, and lowers the curb weight. All in all, it weighs 100 pounds less than a new Mustang GT! This all helps it get to 62 miles per hour in just 2.6 seconds! The car also gets 200 miles of range standard, perfect for an everyday driver.
While the Hispano Suiza Carmen is one of the best daily driver hypercars, the Apollo Intensa Emozione doesn’t give a damn about being a tame grocery getter.
Apollo Intensa Emozione – Raw Exclusivity
Chances are that you’ve never heard of the Apollo Intensa Emozione, or “IE” for short, because there are only 10 in the world! And only 3 are in North America! And that’s a bummer because the IE is one of the craziest cars in the world. It comes with a monstrous V12 engine that screams to an insane 9,000 RPM redline! That’s like Honda Civic level revs.
To reach that redline, there are no tricks, no turbos. The IE has 6.3 liters of naturally-aspirated fury! Norman Choi, the man behind the car, thought that modern hypercars are just too easy to drive, so he took inspiration from GT1 cars of old and the power and design of new and he came up with the absolutely mental Apollo IE.
The IE, while absurd, wasn’t created to be the fastest or even the most powerful car on the road, it was just designed to be a thrilling ride that might be a little bit more than you can handle. It’s just like the next car on our list except it was designed 30 years earlier! Ladies and gents, the Vector W8.
Vector W8 – Future of the Eighties
If the ’80s could be summed up in one car, the Vector W8 just might be it. It’s got bold looks, fancy gizmos, and questionable reliability. The Vector W8 really had it all! The team at Vector was inspired by fighter jets and implemented “Aeromotive Engineering,” a manufacturing process that was more like assembling a plane than a car.
Vector empowered a big boy 6-liter V8 for the W8, but they kept adding crazy with two additional turbos, which pushed the W8 to a claimed top speed of 242 miles per hour! They reached that speed at the Bonneville Salt Flats in a high-downforce W8 with a detuned motor, meaning the W8 may have been capable of even more!
So why did the Vector fade from automotive memory? Well, as we said, it was the ’80s. Bad decisions were kind of the name of the game back then. Vector paired the massive V8 with a questionable 3-speed gearbox, which limited the car’s acceleration and top speed. But one of the main reasons that you and I don’t know about the W8 is because of the production. Only 22 W8s made it out of the factory. And with their questionable reliability, not many were seen out on the road.
Let’s go back to the future, the electrified future of hypercars, where the Rimac Nevera is setting a new definition of the word hypercar.
Rimac Nevera – The Standard of the Future
8.52 seconds. That’s about the amount of time it takes to tie one of your shoes… or take a Rimac Nevera down a quarter-mile strip of asphalt. Fun fact: I’m nearly 40 and still tie my shoes the rabbit ears way. Anyway, 1,914 horsepower is all available under your right foot when piloting this death trap. Even Richard Hammond couldn’t hang behind the wheel of a Rimac. But, honestly, I don’t think I could handle the heat even on public roads either.
The Nevera has recorded 0-to-60 times under 2 seconds, even as fast as 1.9 seconds! And since it’s fully electric, the car was able to do run after run without adding time to each run. That 8.52-second quarter-mile sprint wasn’t the first run, not the second, but the eleventh run!
So, you tell me, is EV the future? Rimac sure thinks so and, since it’s the fastest accelerating car in the world, what about you? Are EVs getting fast enough to pique your interest? Well, I hope you’re rich, because all of the 150 units fetched a $2.5 million asking price, which is just a bit out of my budget. But so is the Italdesign Zerouno.
Italdesign Zerouno – Start of Something Big
Italdesign is a VW subsidiary. You may not have heard of them, but you’ve heard of their work: the BMW M1, Subaru SVX, Lexus GS, and the Maserati MC12. That kind of design clout means the Italdesign Zerouno isn’t exactly cheap. Coming in at around $1.7 million bucks, it’s expensive, like the other cars on this list, but at least it’s powered by petrol.
The Italdesign Zerouno burns dead dinos with a 5.2-liter V10. You might recognize its exhaust note from Brad’s supercar’s bigger brother, the V10 Audi R8. The whole project was based on being fully lightweight and, apparently, having as many vents and wings and winglets as possible.
But what in the world is a Zerouno? Since it’s the first production car from Italdesign’s low production hypercar company, the name was a mashup of “zero” and “uno.” Get bit? It’s the first. And there are only five of them! There’s also a roadster edition that’ll set you back $2.4 million. We’re not sure how many of those there will be, but don’t expect double digits.
Now, Italdesign probably will go on to make many hypercars. Unfortunately for the next company, they only had one chance… and they blew it. I’m talking about the Cizeta V16T.
Cizeta V16T – It’s Not a Lambo
Take one look at a V16T and the word “Lamborghini” comes right out of our mouths. And while it is not a Lamborghini, the V16T is about as close to a Lamborghini as you can get without wearing the raging bull emblem. Why? Well, because the V16T was developed by a team of ex-Lamborghini employees. With an engine derived from two Lamborghini Urraco V8s smushed together. Yes, the V16T indeed has a V16 in it.
When released in 1991, the V16T came with a hefty price tag of $650,000, which in today’s money is like four Bitcoin or something. I suck at math. For the first four years of production, only 12 V16Ts were ever produced. The company then moved its headquarters to Los Angeles and only produced two more cars, one coupe and one spyder, which took literal years to produce.
According to an interview in 2018, the V16T was still theoretically in production and still available for purchase, even though none had been produced since the 2003 spyder. If you were patient enough to get your hands on one, the V16T boasted a top speed of over 200 miles per hour and styling like nothing else on the roads. I mean, what’s better than pop-up headlights? That’s right, two sets of them.
Sadly, today, you can’t buy cars with pop-up headlights, but you can buy the insanely beautiful Pininfarina Battista. Well, that is, if you have $2.5 million.
Pininfarina Battista – Beautifully Designed, Properly Engineered
Now, I know you’ve heard of Pininfarina before, but that’s typically for their design work. So what happens when a designer of the world’s most prestigious cars decides to go out and make their own car? They knock it out of the park!
The Battista is stunning inside and out. Seriously, that interior is badass. With digital displays and geometric pattern inlays everywhere, you get what you pay for with the Battista. What you really pay for is the performance, electric hypercar performance thanks to a partnership with Rimac. That’s right, another EV hypercar!
This one boasts 1,900 horsepower, a 0-to-60 that rivals the Tesla Model S Plaid, a range of 310 miles per charge, and an artificial engine note tuned to multiples of 54 hertz, which is apparently some kind of classical music frequency that I don’t understand because I listened to too much metal and I can’t hear half the frequencies anyway.
Now, Pininfarina has plans for 150 Battistas to be dispersed across the globe, so maybe, just maybe, we will be able to see one of these rockets raging on American roads one day.
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