NextEV is a company that has been much talked about lately, especially about its new electric supercar that has been seen on a few photos and without any info or specifications available. Finally, the manufacturer has taken down the curtains and decided to unveil their vehicle to broader public which can now put a name behind an image – NIO EP9.
When speed is the factor on which the quality of electric cars is judged than the Nürburgring Nordschleife lap is a widely accepted benchmark for that. NextEV’s EP9 is more than good by those standards because it has the fastest lap time around the “Ring” – 7.05,12 which is substantially better than the one made by Toyota TMG EV P002 back in 2012 which was 7.22,329. NextEV wanted to make sure that this isn’t just one case when the car performed good and made fantastic results, so they decided to back that up with 1.52,78 lap around the Paul Ricard circuit in France, with which they beat the previous electric vehicle lap record of two minutes, 40 seconds. All of this is easily achieved by holding the EP9’s bottom side glued to the road with perfected aerodynamics that produces 24.000 Newtons of downforce at 150 MPH.
The EP9 has a megawatt of power or translated to horsepower a cool 1.360 of them, which is more than impressive. This is accomplished by combining four electric motors with four gearboxes that shoot the car from standstill to 60 MPH in 2.7 seconds and to 125 MPH in just 7.1 seconds while topping out at speeds of 200 MPH. One more great characteristic of this vehicle is its exchangeable battery system that can fully charge in just 45 minutes while offering a range of staggering 265 miles.
But wait, seems that NextEV wasn’t totally satisfied with just these numbers and decided to hint something additional to the vehicle and that is the possibility of applying autonomous technology to the EP9. They even stated, “integrated e-control structure and sensor system layout […] could fit the latest autonomous driving technology” but this is somewhat a vague statement especially when it is followed by the promise of “a joyful experience for users with digital interaction and instant sharing.” With this description, we can not decide if the interior of the vehicle is optimized for taking selfies while EP9 drives, but we believe that 1360 HP electric supercar should be enough by itself to make you forget the social media for some time.