It’s getting harder to make your car stand out in the sea of multi-million dollar hybrid and high-revs hypercars, but an Italian startup from Sasha Selipanov (the designer of the Bugatti Chiron and Koenigsegg Gemera) called Nilu27 promises a new raw experience that billionaire buyers can’t get anywhere else. With a fully exposed 1000-horsepower 6.5-liter V12 and a 7-speed manual transmission, this car is a throwback to the good old days of connected driving, in the best way.
There isn’t a hint of electrification in this mad machine, relying only on a Hartley Engines-built V12 (with glorious individual throttle bodies) for motivation. It’s never going to be as quick in the quarter mile as an electric sedan, but it should have some emotional connection with its driver, and good lord, I hope more of that trickles down back to the rest of the car market. This lightweight and grippy track-focussed hypercar is the kind of pipe dream thing kids dreamt about before Bugatti ever built that god-forsaken Veyron.
Nilu says the car will deliver “a raw, unfiltered, uncensored driving experience” with design inspiration from “’60s F1 and Le Mans racers, classic Italian design houses, the Bauhaus “form follows function” philosophy, old school American muscle, drift cars, mathematics, and avant garde metal music.” I’m not sure about all that, but I sure as hell like the sound of it.
I am a certified supercar hater, but I really like the work that Nilu has put into this wild machine. The outside looks like a combination of spaceship, Can Am racer, and wildly unrealistic concept with a touch of early Lamborghini Countach. That’s the way a supercar should look. The interior looks like the kind of thing I’d want to spend money to sit in, and its orange-to-black gradient is intoxicating.
Only fifteen of these things will be built, and for the time being they aren’t going to be street-legal. Allegedly the company is working on certification for a street-legal version which will be built in an additional 54-unit run. It sounds to me like the company needs the funds from the first 15 track cars in order to finish the work to get them street legalized. Will this thing ever actually see the light of day? I hope so.
I know I‘ll never see one, and every single one will be sold to war criminals and labor thieves, but the engineering behind the car is cool, and I want it to exist. The car will make its debut on the Pebble Beach lawn later this month.