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$3.6 million Aspark Owl electric supercar preorders begin

Japan’s Aspark is taking preorders for its battery-electric Owl at the Paris Motor Show, promising deliveries starting in mid-2020 for the supercar, first revealed a year ago in Frankfurt, that promises a sprint time of less than 2 seconds.

Bloomberg reports the Japanese engineering firm is taking nonrefundable deposits of 1 million euros — about $1.15 million at today’s conversion rate — and plans to build 50 examples. Total cost of the car will be the equivalent of $3.6 million.

Osaka-based Aspark’s Owl first turned heads at last year’s Frankfurt auto show, saying that its 0-62 mph time of 2 seconds was a key focus in developing the car. It’s now promising to hit that sprint in just 1.99 seconds. In February, the company released a video of the Owl launching in a brisk 1.87 seconds, which rivals the claims made for the next-generation Tesla Roadster, though the prototype was reportedly fitted with racing tires.

The latest specs, per Bloomberg, peg the Owl at 1,150 horsepower and 652 pound-feet of torque, with a dry weight of around 3,300 pounds. That’s up significantly from last year, when the company said it weighed less than 1,900 pounds, though engineers are reportedly still finalizing the powertrain and debating how many electric motors to use. Top speed remains 174 mph, and range is 186 miles on a full charge. You’ll reportedly have to wait another year or so to test-drive it, however.

It’s worth pointing out that the Owl’s specs are dwarfed by fellow electric supercars like the 1,914-hp Rimac C_Two, said to do 0-60 mph in just 1.85 seconds and have a top speed of 258 mph, with 404 miles of range. It’s also a relative bargain at a cool $2.1 million. The new Tesla Roadster, when it launches, will go 620 miles on a charge and be priced at just $250,000.

The Owl is on display this week at the Paris Motor Show.

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Koenigsegg sees new Tesla Roadster as the ‘gauntlet’ thrown down

Christian von Koenigsegg, the man behind the company that holds the current record for world’s fastest car, does not like to be outdone. So he did not particularly enjoy hearing the numbers regarding the forthcoming next-generation Tesla Roadster and its vaunted 1.9-second 0-60 mph time.

“We kind of had our future mapped out, and then we heard about the new Tesla Roadster and its insane acceleration numbers, and we thought ‘Damn, that’s put the gauntlet down,'” the Koenigsegg founder and CEO told Top Gear.

As he told the site, he enlisted his engineers to start running numbers, and within a couple of days, they’d figured out a solution. “The simplest way of putting it is like this: It’s combining direct drive with the hybridization we have in a different format with free-valve engine technology, in a peculiar layout,” von Koenigsegg said. He said the powertrain could take a car from 0-250 mph in 14 seconds “or something like this,” and said he wants to make a combustion engine with a higher power density than an electric powertrain “for as long as possible.”

His talk about hybrids brings to mind the Koenigsegg Regera plug-in hybrid, which weighs just 3,505 pounds and puts out more than 1,500 horsepower. It does 0-62 mph in 2.8 seconds — impressive, but a full 0.9 seconds less than the Roadster’s purported time. And not surprising for a company that is all about maximizing ponies, Koenigsegg likes to geek out over the details of things like the design of the 1,160-hp Agera RS engine. Could he be talking about the same vehicle as the successor to the Agera RS, rumored to be called Ragnarok?

Tesla, meanwhile, unveiled said Roadster at Grand Basel in Switzerland — or rather, it showed off what appeared to be a white, empty design shell that had been shown last year at Tesla’s shareholder meeting.

And don’t forget that the mad scientists over at Hennessey are tinkering with the 7.6-liter V8 for the Venom F5, the key to its quest to hit 300 mph. So buckle your seat belts, boys and girls: Things are about to get very fast.

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Watch Jay Leno scream in a next-generation Tesla Roadster

Jay Leno drives a lot of cool, interesting and exclusive cars. Often enough, he’s behind the wheel of something green — like this car made of hemp, for instance. Most recently, though, he got into a trio of Teslas in order to suss out the company’s past, present and future. Representing those eras, Leno drove the original Tesla Roadster, the Model 3 and, finally, took a ride in the next-gen Roadster, which Elon Musk snuck into the end of his Tesla Semi reveal.

In this episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” he meets up with Tesla design boss Franz von Holzhausen. Together, they talk about technology, performance and the styling of these EVs before hopping into a Model 3 for a drive.

Then, about 3½ minutes into the video, they hop into the new Roadster.

They go over the specs — and we should keep in mind that when von Holzhausen mentions “10,000 [Newton] meters of torque,” he qualifies that with “at the wheels.” We don’t yet know what the torque figures for the electric motors are in the terms we usually use to describe a car’s performance. Suffice it to say it’s enough to propel the Roadster to over 250 miles per hour with enough force that “it hurts the fluid in your eyeballs.”

It’s enough to make Leno scream in the passenger seat and proclaim, “I’ll buy it! I’ll take it!”

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SpaceX option package for 2020 Tesla Roadster could add more performance

Seems a detail escaped our story on Tesla’s Annual Shareholder Meeting last week. Company CEO Elon Musk said the Roadster and semi introduced last year are merely the base versions, and that their production units would offer more performance. Concerning the open-top, Musk said, “What we unveiled with the Roadster was the base model performance. It’s going to have a SpaceX options package. It’s crazy.”

The comment adds more detail to a few tweets Musk wrote in November last year, one saying, “There will be a special option package that takes it to the next level.” Following tweets added, “Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package *will* definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …,” and, “Certainly possible. Just a question of safety. Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.”

Some believe the SpaceX package could be no more than special badging and the Midnight Cherry color matching the Roadster Musk recently sent into space. However, the betting line leans heavily toward an even more potent Roadster. We’ve already been promised a 0-60 mile-per-hour time of 1.9 seconds – likely using the four-seater’s Plaid Mode, a quarter-mile time of 8.8 seconds, a top speed beyond 250 mph, and 620 miles of range on a single charge. That’s hypercar performance for around $200,000 to $250,000, less than one-sixth the usual hypercar price.

Yet Musk wants no question about the Roadster’s superiority, telling the audience at the shareholder’s meeting, “It’s important for us to show with the Roadster that an electric vehicle can outperform a gasoline car in every way. Because gasoline cars still have sort of a halo effect, and I think if we can show an electric car can outperform a gasoline car in every way, then we sort of get rid of that halo effect of gasoline cars.”

The semi and the Roadster are expected in production next year, so it shouldn’t be too long before we find out what the SpaceX package entails — perhaps a faster form of ground-based flight, or something with a bit more altitude.

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Watch a next-gen Tesla Roadster rocket down a test track

Tesla was recently spotted testing its next-generation Roadster on the test track at its factory in Fremont, Calif., and now we have footage of the supercar’s vaunted launch capabilities. Twitter user Shehryar Khan posted the following video last week complete with an adoring, all-caps tagline (beware the salty language at the end).

In the video, you can see the car’s windows are down, and a ringing brake squeal is audible as the Roadster pulls up to a stop before launching. Then the tires squeal as the driver floors the accelerator and the Roadster positively screams off the line.

The video, of course, is too short and unscientific to serve as validation for Tesla’s claims that the supercar will be the “quickest car in the world” and do 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds and reach 100 mph in 4.2 seconds. But it’s clear the Roadster will be more than peppy off the block.

The all-wheel-drive, four-seat Roadster will be powered by a 200kWh battery pack that Tesla says will give it a 620-mile driving range, plus three electric motors — one on the front and two on the rear. Base price on the new Roadster will be $200,000 when it hits the market in 2020, assuming Tesla can make good on its claims and conquer everything else on its considerable to-do list.

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Elon Musk teases a flying version of Roadster supercar. Is he serious?

Tesla surprised the world last week when it revealed its Roadster on the same day it debuted its much-awaited (and much-hyped) electric-powered semi truck. Founder Elon Musk claims the car can do 0-60 in just 1.9 seconds, which would make it the fastest production car, and will have a 620-mile driving range.

Now, he’s claiming the supercar may eventually possess the ability to fly. He took to Twitter Sunday first to clarify that the 0-60 time is “the base model performance” but also to tease a “special option package that takes it to the next level.” We’ll let you read it below.

What to make of the latest Musk claim? Well, the unexpected news about the Roadster has already led many observers to wonder if Tesla is spreading itself too thin and creating more financial strains at a time when it needs to focus on fixing production bottlenecks for its Model 3 sedan, its attempt at an affordable, mass-market car, and reversing mounting financial losses. This will likely only add fuel to that fire.

Musk is also CEO of SpaceX and has frequently borrowed technologies developed by the rocket developer for Tesla, including a space-grade superalloy for Tesla’s “Ludicrous Mode,” notes Electrek. So he’d certainly have a leg up on his competitors in that regard.

Or, he could simply be joking.

Musk expressed uncommon skepticism about flying cars earlier this year in a TED Talk, saying they’d be noisy and generate high levels of wind force, according to USA Today.

“If something’s flying over your head and there’s a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,” Musk said at the time. “You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and guillotine me?'”

So we’ll ultimately have to wait for more details from Musk and his Twitter feed. Meanwhile, the Roadster will launch in 2020 with a Founder’s Series model priced at $250,000 and limited to just 1,000 models.

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Sunday Drive: Performance comes in many shapes and sizes

The Chevrolet Corvette has always stood out as a bastion of reasonably priced performance, and the latest ‘Vette has that in spades. And while its expected starting price of around $120,000 certainly isn’t cheap, it’s an undeniable deal in the supercar world – remember, this thing’ll do 210 miles per hour thanks to its 755-horsepower supercharged V8 engine. And did you get a load of that massive rear wing?

Team Corvette’s longtime foe, the Porsche 911, is similarly hellbent on ultimate performance. And as a reminder of how long the Corvette/911 rivalry has been melting tires we present the 1990 Porsche 911 as reimagined by Singer you see below. It’s beautiful, it’s green, and it’s packing 500 air-cooled horsepower.

You don’t have to burn gasoline to go fast, as proven by the second-generation Tesla Roadster, which was revealed as a surprise late last week. Elon Musk says it’ll be the quickest car in the world with a 0-60 time of just 1.9 seconds. And while you may not think of a semi truck when you think speed, the Tesla Semi can do 0-60 in 5 seconds flat unloaded, or in 20 seconds with a load of 80,000 pounds. Compared to today’s crop of diesel semis, that’s amazing.

Continuing the truck theme, we present an artists rendering of what the next-generation Ram 1500 pickup may look like. Spoiler alert: Ram’s mini-semi look is giving way to something much more modern. There may even be a first-of-its-kind split tailgate at the rear. And if you don’t think the Ram 1500 has anything to do with performance, we should remind you that it’s one of the cheapest ways to get a tire-shredding Hemi V8 engine in America.

Chevy Corvette ZR1 2019 Chevy Corvette ZR1: All hail the 755-horsepower C7 king
Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer This is the first Porsche 911 to get Singer and Williams’ 500-horsepower engine
Tesla Roadster Tesla Roadster surprise reveal | ‘Quickest car in the world’
Tesla Semi truck Tesla Semi Truck revealed: Here are the key details
Ram 1500 rendering This could be the next-generation 2019 Ram 1500
Ram 1500 split tailgate 2019 Ram 1500 spotted with split tailgate

Here’s the next-generation Tesla Roadster

In addition to unveiling its new electric Semi Truck, Tesla also dished details on its next-generation Roadster. Tesla calls the all-wheel-drive EV the “quickest car in the world,” with a claimed 0-60 mile-per-hour time of just 1.9 seconds. The sprint to 100 mph takes only 4.2 seconds, and its top speed is over 250 mph.

Tesla didn’t reveal horsepower or kilowatt figures, but said wheel torque is 10,000 Newton-meters, or 7,375 pound-feet. That translates to a quarter-mile time of 8.8 seconds.

Perhaps just as impressive, this four-seat EV will have a driving range of 620 miles on a single charge. Range anxiety, begone! The new Tesla Roadster will also feature a trick glass roof that stows in the trunk.

The car won’t come cheap, though. Its base price will be $200,000, though hard-hustling Tesla owners can score one for free through the automaker’s referral program. Just to reserve it will cost $50,000. Tesla will launch the Roadster with a Founder’s Series model, priced at $250,000 and limited to 1,000 examples.

Expect to hear more about the next-gen Tesla Roadster in the near future. For now, take a gander in the image gallery above.

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