Some performance-car buyers can’t imagine a world without internal-combustion engines. Others want to rush headlong into the EV revolution.
Car designers and twin brothers Nikita and Iliya Bridan have a uniquely ambitious approach: Why not have both? Their Oilstainlab HF-11 seems aimed at wealthy buyers who can’t decide between, say, a gas-swilling Ferrari Daytona SP3 or a battery-stuffed Rimac Nevera.
You may have heard of battery swaps, from companies such as China’s Nio. Now wrap your brain around a powertrain swap: The HF-11 will let owners buy a hypercar with two rear propulsion units—one a V-6 racing engine, the other a high-revving electric motor—and swap them out, in relatively simple and speedy fashion.
Feel like driving an electric hypercar today, and its gasoline doppelganger tomorrow? Oilstainlab will make it so.
Yes, it sounds like something a car-crazed teenager might dream up after watching too many Transformers movies. Even Nikita Bridan, who has worked on advance designs for Cadillac, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Lexus, Toyota, and others, acknowledges the swaps sounded like a terrible idea initially.
“The first reaction is ‘No, that’s impossible,’” Bridan says. “They’re two different electrical systems, everything.”
“But then we said, wait: They weigh the same, they rev roughly the same, the cooling and space requirements are the same. Hmm, this might actually work.”
The Road to a Two-in-One Car
Founded in 2019, the Long Beach, Calif. company made a splash at the U.K.’s Goodwood Festival of Speed with the Half11, a Porsche-adjacent retro racer that seemed like a node on an alternate-history timeline: Familiar to anyone who loved peak-tech Can-Am racing of the ‘60s and ‘70s, yet oddly fresh and different.
The Bridans were born in Ukraine and raised in Canada. The self-described high-school dropouts later attended top design schools in California and Italy, and are alumni and associate professors at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Their proudly irreverent, rule-breaking company is now developing the HF-11, and plans to build 25 copies at a cool US $2.35 million for the swappable-powertrain version.
The Bridans also took inspiration from an unforgettable moment in racing history, which I had the fortune of witnessing in the Audi garage during the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2000. Audi was aiming to win its first-ever Le Mans when its silver R8 racer rolled into the nighttime pits. Audi analysis had shown the car’s transmission was its weak link. So Audi pulled a literal fast one, all designed, planned and rehearsed in advance. In the garage, a complete gearbox assembly—essentially the entire rear end of the car—seemed to appear out of nowhere. Audi techs cooly swapped that unit in four minutes, versus a then-typical 90 minutes or more. Minds were blown around the globe, the pit stop becoming as famous as the race result itself.
Racer Allan McNish sped off to join his teammates on a 1-2-3 sweep of the podium. And Audi had demonstrated its technical superiority in morale-crushing fashion. The race kicked off Audi’s unprecedented run of 13 Le Mans titles in 17 years.
“Let’s call that Audi the spirit animal for all of this,” Bridan says. “And it’s possible if you engineer the car that way from the start.”
The HF-11’s mid-engine design includes a bespoke carbon-fiber monocoque to be built in Canada, with composite body panels, high-strength Docol steel subframes and adjustable dampers by Ohlins Racing. But it’s the quick-change “Thunder-Volt” system that sets this “street legal, socially irresponsible” machine apart.
For $1.85 million, buyers can get a standard gasoline version with a 4.5-liter, 650-horsepower (487 kilowatt) V-6 that revs to a lofty 12,000 rpm. An additional $500,000 brings a second, electric power unit. Why such a steep jump? As you’d imagine, that switchable powerplant brought a dizzying array of engineering challenges to overcome.
“How do you get those units to play nicely together?” Bridan asks. “There’s a lot of cool details involved that you don’t think of originally.”
“They weigh the same, they rev roughly the same, the cooling and space requirements are the same. Hmm, this might actually work.” —Nikita Bridan, Oilstainlab
One solution is a solid-state fusebox, developed by Bugatti, to allow an instant switch between the EV’s 800-volt system and the combustion engine’s 12-volt power. As for the rest, Bridan estimates the swap could be accomplished in as little as one hour by a company tech or skilled mechanics. The switcheroo mainly involves six bolts for the main subframe, a few 100-pin electric connectors, water lines, a hydraulic link for the gearbox and a cable for the clutch. A front radiator and water lines through the central tunnel can cool either the battery case or the gasoline engine, no changes required.
“That’s basically it,” Bridan says. “You don’t really need to get into the brake system or anything.”
That EV unit targets 1 megawatt (1,340 horsepower) of power via a single, 13,000-rpm electric motor. If the company can pull off a curb-weight target of 907 kilograms (2,000 pounds), the electric HF-11’s power-to-weight ratio would top virtually any production car. That includes the $2.5 million Rimac Nevera R, whose astounding 2,107 horsepower (1,596 kilowatts) is countered by a curb weight north of 2,300 kilograms (5,070 pounds). One key to that mass target is a roughly 80-kWh, pouch-format battery with a high-silicon anode to boost gravimetric and volumetric energy density.
Despite an ongoing retrenchment in EVs, “the industry has invested billions in next-gen batteries,” Bridan says. “They exist but haven’t been commercialized. We don’t want to overpromise, but we’re looking at the exact same weight or lighter for the EV version, versus the combustion version with a full tank of gas. The battery is the game changer that really allowed the swap to happen.”
The HF-11’s EV version spins up a muscular 1 megawatt of power via a 13,000-rpm electric motor.Oilstainlab
Volume production cars have yet to overcome those hurdles and bring high-silicon batteries to showrooms. But as EV battery makers look to move away from Chinese graphite in favor of silicon materials, Mercedes has announced plans to bring Sila Technologies’ silicon anodes to its electric G-Class SUV sometime next year. At higher reaches, the McMurtry Spéirling Pure prototype, the update of the record-smashing British track car—it uses electric fans to suck itself to the ground with 2,000 kilograms of downforce—is integrating silicon anode cells from Taiwan’s Molicel, in a cylindrical 5.0Ah 21700 form factor.
Despite the electric muscle, Bridan says the HF-11 isn’t out to set speed records. When garden-variety Tesla or Lucid sedans can accelerate faster than many supercars, straight-line performance is no longer a key differentiator, Bridan says.
“It’s more about the experience, the joy of driving, and that leads you down a very different development path,” Bridan says. “We want to make a return to super-light sports cars. Currently, the electric tech only allows that in a $2 million car. We want to move downmarket at some point, but the tech has to catch up, scale up and become affordable.”
That old-school feel includes an optional six-speed manual transmission and hydraulic clutch that no production EV currently offers.
The company plans to begin testing a prototype HF-11 in April, and spend roughly a year developing the car with prospective buyers who will be intimately involved in the process—a group the company has fondly dubbed “Maniacs.” Oilstainlab hopes to start production in 2026 or 2027.
Setting aside Rimacs and other seven-figure fantasies, you can’t find a two-seat electric sports car in North American showrooms, though the China-built, roughly $70,000 MG Cyberster recently went on sale in the EU. Bridan acknowledges that sports-car buyers have appeared especially resistant to electrification. Their long list of concerns includes excess weight, short driving range, the aforementioned synthetic driving experience, or fast technical obsolescence and brutal depreciation. But designing a swappable platform, Bridan says, creates a gateway drug for combustion loyalists.
“There’s an opportunity for someone to buy something they’re comfortable with, and then they can be a little, well, bi-curious,” Bridan says with a chuckle. “We’re already getting a lot of closeted EV fans.”
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