Hennessey plans six-wheeled 2400bhp EV
Hennessey will follow its speed-record-hunting Venom F5 hypercar with its first electric car, a six-wheeled grand tourer with a mindboggling power output and a $3 million (£2.25m) price.
Known as Project Deep Space, the US firm’s EV (rendered by Autocar above, based on official sketches) will feature both a central driving position and a diamondshaped four-seat layout.
Boss John Hennessey said it will be about six metres long and that it should also be the fastest-accelerating fourseater from rest to 200mph.
Work has already begun on the production car, which should be launched in 2026. No more than 105 examples will be made.
Hennessey told Autocar that he had been thinking about EVs for years but always struggled with the weight of sufficiently potent battery packs for brandappropriate performance.
“Then I thought: ‘What if it isn’t a hypercar like the F5 and we accept that it’s going to weigh something more than 4000lb [1814kg]? Maybe it could be something that carried more than two people.’”
The car will use a motor for each wheel to get maximum traction. Hennessey wouldn’t be drawn on a final power figure but said: “It’s pretty common to be able to generate 400bhp per electric motor, so doing the math suggests a serious amount of power if we decided to do that.”
The presumed output of around 2400bhp would make the Deep Space far more powerful than the Lotus Evija and Pininfarina Battista (driven) electric hypercars. Shell-owned Pennzoil and Cosworth-owned Delta are contributing to development of the Deep Space powertrain.
Hennessey called it “the modern equivalent of something like a Bugatti Royale” and said the range should be “greater than that which currently exists”. One has been sold already, to the owner of the Venom F5 that Hennessey showed at Pebble Beach in August.
“How many more guys are out there? I’m not sure, but I do know that in this part of the market, people want to have something completely different to what their friends and rivals own,” said Hennessey.
The outlandish Deep Space will seat four, have all-wheel drive