Enlarge (credit: NextEV)
Zero to sixty. Horsepower per kilogram. Nürburgring lap times. All great ways of bench-racing cars in order to win arguments in the pub (or on an Internet forum). And if the latter is your go-to yardstick for performance, there’s a new king of the electric vehicles in town: the NextEV Nio EP9.
NextEV hasn’t released the entire lap video, but this should give you a flavor of how the car performed at the Nordschleife.
NextEV is a Chinese EV maker, and it’s going to launch a range of electric (and eventually autonomous) cars under the Nio brand (starting in China next year). As is now becoming the default (e.g., Faraday Future), instead of showing us a prototype production model, the company is making a splash with an EV supercar—the 194mph (313km/h) EP9—just six of which will be built.
The EP has been designed for the track-day enthusiast, and so features rapidly swappable batteries. NextEV hasn’t released the kWh rating for the batteries, but says the range is 265 miles (426km) and that recharging takes 45 minutes (swapping the batteries for a fully charged set takes eight minutes apparently). The chassis is—as you’d expect—carbon fiber, and it has a motor-generator unit at each wheel, with a peak power output of 1,341hp/1MW and 1091 ft-lbs/1480 Nm of torque.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – NextEV’s Nio EP9 electric supercar sets a new Nürburgring record