Japan’s newest supercar offering will offer a head-spinning 174mph from EV drivetrain

“You spot your prey 100 metres ahead,” Aspark confidently says. “The main dish for tonight’s dinner. You give chase at ferocious speed. Startled, your prey attempts to flee… but it’s already too late. Letting out a metallic roar, you take off.

“The contest is over almost as soon as it starts,” they conclude. Ladies and gentlemen, the actual human words of Japanese supercar-maker Aspark, describing the EV with which it plans to take over the world: the Owl.

Yes. Owl. That is a name. A name applied to – potentially – the world’s fastest accelerating EV supercar ever. Aspark confidently predicts its carbon-fibre two-seater will be able to deliver a haymaker to the world’s very fastest cars by accelerating from 0-62mph in just two seconds. TWO.

How does it plan on achieving this? A pair of 40kW motors. We’re told Aspark have developed a “completely new current control technology”, offering up 429bhp (320kW) and 563lb ft of torque. They’re small motors, for lightness, because lightness = speed.

There’s a battery and supercapacitor setup (the latter recovering energy from braking), to allow it lots of instant juice for, ahem, head-spinning forward movement. Power is sent to all four wheels (19in at the front, 20 on the back) and the whole shebang sits on a lightweight carbon fibre chassis. The lot weighs in at just 850kg.

If you’re struggling to size it up in your head, it’s roughly the same as a Lamborghini Aventador, but lower, believe it or not. It stands just 990mm tall. Therefore it has a low centre of gravity. We’re assured it should be pointy as well as being, um, accelerate-y. A hoot to drive, we hope.

Speaking of which, once you’re done “letting out a metallic roar”, you’ll be hitting a top speed of 174mph. Not too shabby. We suspect that this might adversely affect the claimed range of 93 miles.

We’ll let you wade in on the design, but we’ll give them a chance because it looks… good. Generic, maybe, but good. Inside, there is “ideal” leather, and four monitors on the instrument panel in place of mirrors. Nice.

No word on the Owl’s price. Nor an on-sale date. But speaking to TopGear.com at the car’s Frankfurt Motor Show reveal, Aspark reckons that one Owl - a fully working car - exists in Japan.

Please relay any and all relevant musings you may be experiencing on the Aspark Owl in the space below. A bona fide electric supercar, or a flight of fancy?

Japan’s newest electric supercar just blitzed the benchmark run

A prototype electric supercar has just accelerated from 0-60mph in 1.92s. Yes folks, Japanese supercar-maker Aspark has tested its Owl EV, and it has delivered.

Delivered on a promise Aspark made last year, confidently predicting its two-seat, butterfly-doored exotic could run the benchmark 0-62mph sprint in less than two.

How? Hoosier racing tyres, to start with. According to information we learned at Frankfurt last year, the Owl runs a pair of 40kW motors, offering up 429bhp and 563lb ft of torque. There’s a battery and supercapacitor setup (the latter recovering energy from braking), for instant juice.

Juice sent to all four wheels of course, for that mind-blowing acceleration run. The motors are small. The car is light (850kg). It sits low (just 990mm tall).

Aspark reckons this Owl is capable of hitting 174mph flat out, a top speed that would likely affect the claimed 93-mile battery range.

But still. 0-60mph in 1.92s. That is ridiculous.

At the height of the muscle car boom in the late 1960s the high watermark for straight-outta-the-showroom street performance was a high-13-second quarter mile time with a terminal speed of just over 100 mph (161 km/h). Things have changed a bit since then. Japan’s Aspark Owl electric hypercar just broke two world records, one of which saw it average almost 200 mph (322 km/h) over a quarter mile. Yes, we said average.

Setting two records in one day is rather less impressive than setting 23, which is what Aspark’s rival, Rimac, did with its Nevera EV earlier this month. And the records that Rimac set were the kind that most of us are most familiar with, including zero to 60 mph (97 km/h) and quarter mile times, though only Aspark’s were ratified by Guinness.

The two records the Owl set at England’s Elvington airfield (famous for Richard Hammond’s 2006 jet car crash) were average speed over an eighth mile (192.03 mph / 309.02 km/h) and average speed over a quarter mile (198.12 mph / 318.85 km/h). The small difference between those numbers underlines how quickly the hypercar accelerates in the first few seconds after leaving the line on the way to a 249 mph (400 km/h) top speed.

Aspark made no mention of attempting to set any acceleration records, but it has previously recorded a 1.72-second zero to 60 mph time (the Nevera did 1.74) and claims it should be capable of dropping below 1.7 seconds. This sounds dramatic but is probably a ton less exciting than wrestling a manual Lamborghini Murcielago to the same speed and taking more than twice as long to do it. As with all of these videos of electric cars going fast, we’re struck by how boring they make the performance seem.

The hardware making those feats possible is a quad-motor drivetrain producing 1,985 hp (1,480 kW / 2,012 PS) and 1,475 lb-ft (2,000 Nm) of torque. That draws energy from a surprisingly small 64 kWh battery, though Aspark claims it’s big enough to deliver over 280 miles (450 km) of range, albeit measured using the massively optimistic (yes, even more optimistic), old-style NEDC protocol. Only 50 Owls will be built, with prices starting at €2.9 ($3.5 / £2.6) million.