- Zenvo is Denmark’s only supercar maker. It currently hand-builds about five cars per year.
- The company doesn’t mess around, and its entry-level vehicle produces more than 1,100 horsepower.
- Zenvo’s founder told Insider about his plans to expand the brand globally and up production numbers.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
The ultra-luxury supercar space is a busy one. Bugatti is, arguably, king of the hill with the 1,500-horsepower, $3 million Chiron, although McLaren, Aston Martin, Porsche, Ferrari, and Mercedes all have, at one point or another, produced similar cars. All of those automakers are attached to huge parent companies (Bugatti and Porsche are under Volkswagen, for example), seeped in history, or both.
Then there’s Zenvo. Zenvo is Denmark’s only car manufacturer, and it doesn’t mess around — even its entry-level vehicle produces more than 1,100 horsepower.
You’ll be forgiven for not having heard of Zenvo, because while its cars are incredibly powerful, only a handful are made each year. The company’s founder and chief technical officer, Troels Vollertsen, said the firm’s first car wasn’t supposed to be quite so powerful — it just ended up that way.
“That it would be a hypercar wasn’t planned,” Vollertsen said. “Tt was going to be a rear wheel driven, lightweight car. Then when we had to design and so on, it suddenly started to look like a hypercar. Horsepower was increasing and it just turned out a little bit like that.”
Vollertsen’s background is in finding ways to help clients go faster than their competition, so it’s no surprise that he ended up with cars well above the 1,000-horsepower barrier. That power also isn’t made from some engine Zenvo bought from a bigger company — a common practice with low-volume carmakers — but instead by one of Zenvo’s own design.
That’s a difficult feat, but Vollertsen is casual about it.
“The rotating assembly on an engine, to me at least, it isn’t the biggest deal,” he said. Try telling that to the countless others who’ve tried to build one.
But Vollertsen’s most proud of his car’s gearbox. He said his competition is taking transmissions better suited for comfortable driving and trying to make them suitable for high power and high performance, which can have mixed results. Vollertsen did the opposite, taking a gearbox better suited to high-performance driving and slowing it down for easier use on the day to day.
Taking historically tough and uncomfortable motorsports-bred transmission tech, and sanitizing it, adding electronics to ensure it will do exactly what you want it to do (and not explode) allows the car to shift not only lightning fast, but also smoothly — and, of course, deal with the kind of power and torque Vollertsen’s engines produce.
But driving around with more than 1,000 horsepower on the road is no easy task, especially when your average car is lucky to have 200. Zenvo’s method of dealing with it is threefold: 1) Limit the power, 2) Let you play with all of the car’s power all at once, 3) Smarts. Well, IQ actually — because that’s what the setting is called.
“We have this setting in the car which is called IQ, and that’s because you should use it if you’re wise,” Vollertsen said. “It’s kind of like you have 400 horsepower available on first gear, 600 in second, 800 in third or whatever it is exactly.”
He said the system is constantly measuring to see how much grip the car has and adjusting itself to suit to keep the things in check, adding: “You can hammer it more or less all the time if you want.”
Zenvo’s cars are packed with smart engineering and the kind of thinking you’d expect to be rolled out on a huge scale, but there’s no mass production going on here. Zenvo builds a handful of cars each year, and there’s a reason for that.
“First of all, when you’re building your first model, you can’t really afford tools [major automakers use],” Vollertsen said “You have to consider that it’s a hand-built car, the process of building the body and trimming the bodywork, it’s a very long process, so no matter what we do in the facilities we have here, we will not be able to produce more than five a year.”
From there, Vollertsen said expansion costs more and more.
“[In the early days], we were six guys working on these cars and everything was happy,” Vollertsen said. “But you need marketing and a big truck, and you’re also driving cars around, so two cars ain’t going to cut it anymore. Now to break even, it’s four, five cars. If you step up to 20 cars, the break even is 15 cars a year or something like that.”
Even when it comes to low volume hypercars, scalability is king.
Taking what Zenvo learned from its first car, the company has something new on the horizon — something that’ll give it a little more visibility.
“We are working on a completely new project which is from scratch, blank paper, which is done now we know that we can build cars,” Vollertsen said. “And we have a brand now, so now we are more confident and can use a bit more money on the tooling, so in this new car, we should eventually, if we can sell them, be able to produce around 20 a year.”
Other than that the new car is going to be a thing, Zenvo isn’t prepared to give up its secrets. Vollersten did say that with the new model comes expansion. Higher volumes means the brand will need more dealers, and Europe and North America have been chosen as Zenvo’s next big markets not only for its new car, but the current (and super limited) line up as well.
With production at only a handful of units a year, Zenvo isn’t planning to keep its tech to itself. After all, it needs to make money to keep afloat.
“With the numbers we’re producing, it’s quite hard to get your money back on development,” Vollertsen said. “So if there are things that are interesting to other people, other brands, we of course are willing to sell.” Of course, the details of who’s interested in what weren’t forthcoming, but Zenvo appears to be in rude health, which is a good sign.
Zenvo may not be 100% on the radar of everyone who has Bugatti posters in their room. With volumes so low they make other low-volume supercar makers look like mass-market brands, you’re unlikely to have seen one outside of a video game or social media. That’s set to change, and on a far bigger scale than before.