Google the word Zenvo, and you’ll get several variations of the same sentence, all including the word “underrated”. It appears that, for the first time, industry insiders and gearheads agree on the fact that the market underestimates rather than overvalues an automobile brand. In an age of exaggerations, when every other advertising campaign promises you “the best,” it’s refreshing to find a brand that stands out thanks to its distinctive traits and attributes rather than its image or marketing efforts.
Zenvo is a Danish hypercar manufacturer that designs and manufactures high-performance vehicles. The luxury automaker gained popularity after Top Gear gave a negative review of the Zenvo ST1 supercar. Since 2014, the company has regrouped and made significant investments in research and development, only to release even more impressive, high-performance cars. But instead of bragging about the success and qualities of its cars, Zenvo worked in silence, letting its vehicles do the talking. This strategy worked wonderfully, as the whole automotive industry is eagerly anticipating the new hybrid hypercar with a V12 powertrain.
Zenvo Manufactures Only Five Cars Per Year
If you want to be in the luxury business and cater to the real 0.1 percent, you need to prioritize exclusivity. Zenvo understands that and keeps production incredibly low. That means, if you’re lucky and rich enough to buy a Zenvo car, there is a very slim chance that you’ll run into someone else at the club driving the same automobile.
According to Robb Report, Zenvo manufactures only five cars per year at its production site in Denmark, and each unit is handmade and personalized according to the customer’s needs and wants. Just to put things into perspective, Automobili Pininfarina has announced that it will build 150 units of the all-electric Battista hyper GT. Meanwhile, Pagani builds 30 units of the Pagani Huayra Roadster per year. Furthermore, Koenigsegg intends to manufacture thousands of hypercars each year, while currently it builds roughly a dozen cars a year. It goes without saying that Zenvo goes against the tide and prefers to be best known for quality instead of quantity.
Zenvo Learned From Its Mistakes And Came Out With An Improved Offer
Back in 2014, Zenvo’s reputation took a serious hit when Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson reviewed the Zenvo ST1. During the test, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and subsequently the supercar didn’t impress the Top Gear team. The hypercar broke not once, but twice. Also, the rear brakes weren’t working properly and, even worse, the hypercar caught fire on track.
It didn’t take long for Zenvo to come up with a lengthy response that blamed all the misfortunes on everything from “extreme drifting” to bad weather and “high-speed testing.” Naturally, Zenvo’s response to the controversy didn’t impress the affluent class, so the Danish hypercar manufacturer went back to its premises and worked tirelessly to improve its automobiles. In the last eight years, Zenvo has successfully mended its damaged reputation and drawn a fresh influx of affluent customers.
Zenvo Builds An Ultra-Lightweight Hypercar
Currently, Zenvo is developing an ultra-lightweight hybrid hypercar, run by a powerful engine and batteries. Zenvo is pairing the engine with an eight-speed automatic transmission, and the engine will be capable of generating 1,200 horsepower independently or 1,800 horsepower with the batteries on. The V12 hybrid hypercar is rumored to hit the market in 2023.
Zenvo Makes Many Of The Car Parts In-House
If you want to prevent supply chain chaos and ensure that your business has the right parts whenever there is a need for them, the solution is to build these components internally.
“The only way to achieve total quality control is to make components ourselves. It’s also part of what makes Zenvo unique,” Troels Vollertsen, founder of Zenvo Automotive, told the Robb Report. “Our fragmented carbon-fiber wheels, for example, are stronger than alloy rims, yet weigh almost half as much [around 17 lbs]. Each has 550 hand-layered pieces and takes a craftsman two weeks to create.”
Zenvo Cars Are Incredibly Powerful
If you buy a hypercar, you expect it to be powerful and fast. Luckily, Zenvo doesn’t disappoint, although Vollertsen says the company doesn’t “target high speeds” and prefers to build supercars that “are responsive and fun-to-drive.” However, the TSR-S remains “a pure, stripped-out race car that isn’t road-legal.”
It is worth noting that, the TSR-S has a 5.8-liter V8 flat plane engine with twin centrifugal superchargers and sequential fuel injection that generates a staggering 1,177 horsepower. This insane hypercar speeds up from 0 to 62 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds and reaches a top speed of 202 miles per hour. Elsewhere, the TS1 GT has under the hood a 5.8-liter V8 flat plane engine. This supercar accelerates from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3 seconds, and reaches a top speed of 233 miles per hour.