The Aspark Owl EV debuted at the Frankfurt motor show last year. As with many of these super-hyper EV one-offs, our first thought was “vaporware.” But this week, the company put out a video of the slick, carbon-fiber lightning bolt ripping off a claimed sprint to 62 mph (100 kph) in just 1.9 seconds. That’s as fast as Tesla claims its new Roadster will be, in case you’re wondering.
According to the website, the Owl prototype uses two 40-kW motors, but “according to calculations, 320 kW of power is required to go from 0 to 100 kph in two seconds. We developed a completely new current-control technology to draw 160-kW of power from those 40-kW motors.” Aspark continues, “So we came up with a completely new idea. We used capacitors powered by the regenerative energy from braking. The super g forces need to be experienced to be believed.”
The video is from a site called Gigazine, entirely in Japanese, but it does have some pictures of the crazy, rear-mounted battery/motor setup of the Owl, which looks like a legit supercar — though we do wonder how many have actually been built.
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The two-seater Owl comes in at about 190 inches long, 76 inches wide and just 39 inches high. It will get 93 miles of range on a single charge.
What we’re most surprised about is the runoff: The rear parking area of this warehouse looks to be too short to get to 62 mph, let alone slow back down to zero. And as you can see, the driver barely has enough room to get it stopped at the corner.
Mark the Aspark Owl down as something we’re cautiously optimistic about. The Owl makes about 1,000 hp, and with that carbon body weighs in at 1,874 pounds. And that’s frickin’ fast. It’s all-wheel drive; that’s basically the only way to can get those numbers outside of top fuel dragster. Speaking of that, in the video, the car looks like it was shot out of a cannon, and we’re wondering what that does to the driver’s neck, retinas and internal organs. For the record, the wheelman looks fine as he scans through the times.
Check out the brochure straight from Aspark below.
Aspark Owl brochure
(3.82 MB)