Italy's Automobili Estrema is living up to its name with absurd performance figures for its first product. The Fulminea electric hypercar promises an absurd 2,040 all-wheel-drive horsepower, and 0-200 mph (0-320 km/h) acceleration in less than 10 seconds.
As mad as those figures sound, there's no reason they can't be real. Indeed, there are a cluster of cars now in various stages of development sitting around the 2,000 horsepower mark: the Lotus Evija, the Aspark Owl, the Rimac C_Two, the Pininfarina Battista... You can more or less have as much power as you want in an electric supercar; heat and battery considerations are your only limits.
Indeed, there are so many ludicrously overpowered electrics being developed now that even though this would be the most powerful production car in the world if it launched today, our eyes are starting to glaze over when we see numbers like these.
I'm fairly sure my eyes wouldn't glaze over if I hopped in one and stomped the go pedal; either that, or they might glaze over permanently, but we now live in a world where basically no peak power promise can move an eyebrow.
Indeed, it's the battery system that has our eyebrows working overtime. Cop a look at this: "The Estrema Fulminea will be the first street-legal hypercar to be equipped with an innovative hybrid battery pack which uses a combination of ABEE’s (Avesta Battery Energy Engineering) solid-state cells paired with ultra-capacitors ... With its hybrid battery pack of 100 kWh, the expected WLTP range will be 520 km (323 miles). Thanks to the innovative solid-state cells, the high-performance hybrid battery (with cell-to-pack technology) will reach an unprecedented energy density of 450 Wh/kg (1,200 Wh/l) with a predicted weight under 300 kg (661 lb) and a total curb weight of 1,500 kg (3,307 lb)."
Whoa, Nelly. 450 Wh/kg would be impressive even if this thing didn't have to carry around the high-powered but low-energy bulk of an ultracapacitor. If Automobili Estrema – and more to the point, its Belgian battery partner ABEE – manage to get such a thing to market in 2023 as promised, then this truly will be big news.
The company says it's building 61 Fulmineas in Italy's "Motor Valley" of Modena, where people will take one look at it and think it's a Lambo that ran out of petrol rolling downhill.
Source: Automobili Estrema
