“Up close with the $529,000 Renovo Coupe electric supercar”
By Chris Ziegler and Nathan Ingraham
The overwhelming majority of people will never drive this car. But to Renovo, that’s just fine.
The word “supercar” came up several times during my conversations with Renovo CEO Chris Heiser and CTO Jason Stinson, which doesn’t normally appear in the same sentence as “electric vehicle.” The Renovo Coupe changes that, running an unapologetic half-million dollars in exchange for a Shelby Daytona-bodied monster with 1,000 ft-lbs. of torque. 0-60 comes in a promised 3.4 seconds. And there’s not a single cubic inch of gasoline power to be found.
The Coupe is as beautiful in person as it looks in the pictures that have cropped up since it debuted at Pebble Beach last August. The prototype model, on display at Nvidia’s CES booth this year, had been repainted to match Nvidia’s color scheme with streaks of bright green playing against a metallic silver background. It looks great. Then again, there isn’t a color scheme that would make this car look bad.
It’s at Nvidia’s booth because Renovo is using the company’s new X1 platform to do some pretty outrageous things with the Coupe’s dashboard. The instrument cluster and center stack are both dominated by large displays, rendering beautiful 3D elements without a hint of stutter or lag — it’s still very rough around the edges, but Renovo doesn’t plan to deliver its first customer car until the end of the year, so there’s plenty of time to iron out the kinks.
A rebodied classic isn’t everyone’s idea of a perfect supercar, but Renovo teases that this won’t be its only model — they refer to the systems underpinning the Coupe as a “platform.” I’ll take an electric Countach, please.
