Electric supercar maker claims sub-2s 0-100km/h sprint

Staying in Japan — yet somehow on a topic more theoretical than a guy selling tubers out of the boot of his two-seater sports car — oddball electric supercar firm Aspark Owl has been in the news this week.

Aspark Owl? No, not a prog rock band, nor a deleted character from an early Harry Potter draft. Aspark Owl is the latest shed-engineered manufacturer to join the race to play Tesla at its own game with a super-fast, super slippery electric sports car.

The sharp, flat Japanese design debuted at the Frankfurt motor show last year, where its creators were promising acceleration unlike anything seen before. Well okay, acceleration like a nextgeneration Tesla Roadster, at any rate.

Elon Musk reckons the latter is good for a superbike-worrying 0-100km/h sprint of under two seconds. The plucky boffins at Aspark Owl claimed pretty much the same thing. Which, given the car on show was essentially a 1:1 scale model, generated more scepticism than healthy admiration.

Well, now a couple of videos have surfaced showing what purports to be the Aspark Owl car going through acceleration testing . . . in what looks more like a car park behind a Bunnings than a high-tech test facility.

There are two videos showing a rapidly accelerating supercar. The first run delivers a truly impressive 1.87 seconds. The second, an ever-so-slightly longer 1.92 seconds. These both beat what Tesla claims its Roadster will do, although in truth we only have Aspark Owl’s word for it that the car reached 100km/h in each run.

As mentioned above, the location for the videoed run is a strangely short course across shoddy looking tarmac. Whoever is in the driver’s seat is clearly more confident in the prototype’s stopping abilities, than the rest of the world is in its acceleration.

If you give a hoot about Aspark Owl, you’ll find the short videos on Driven.co.nz.