- Look, I'll admit it,
I've been pretty hard on certain supercars lately.
The Lykan HyperSport, the Devel Sixteen,
and the SSC Tuatara,
but today my sights are set
on a carbon fiber, funky doored,
all electric contender in Donut's own backyard.
It's called the RAESR Tachyon Speed.
This full-size hot wheel built
in an industrial park in California
claims to have more horsepower than a Bugatti Veyron,
a top speed of over 240 miles per hour
and the craziest number of them all,
almost 4,000 foot pounds of torque.
4,000 foot pounds of torque.
Is RAESR making promises that can't follow through on,
or is this thing actually legit?
The answer is more complicated than you might think.
We're gonna take a look at just
how feasible these claims are
and what this car will be up against
when it actually gets released.
I apologize for my voice being a little weird.
Last night, I went to a Mastodon show and it was awesome.
You might've heard of the RAESR Tachyon Speed
because it was added
to "Forza Horizon 4" sometime last year.
Gaming has always been a great way
for people to find out about rare or unique cars,
especially when that car is really, really fast.
And so when people got to drive the digitized Tachyon Speed
that they had never seen before,
Google searches spiked and forums lit up
with people trying to figure out how the heck to say RAESR,
I'm still not sure that I'm saying it correctly myself.
No matter how you say it,
this thing looks right at home in a video game.
From the way the front and back are spiked,
to the crazy way the doors open,
to the fact that this is a tandem two-seater.
YouTubers and car vloggers such as Supercar Blondie
have been given the grand tour of this car.
A few of them have even gotten to sit
in the centralized driver's seat
and putt it around a parking lot.
And to do that, you have to first use a key,
except that this car doesn't have a key.
It has the whole steering wheel with built-in controls
for the actuated doors, ride height,
adjustability, and active aero.
This car feels like it's got a few gimmicks
to make it feel like a race car,
but this is where we start to see
some very familiar telltale signs
that something might be up.
(intense music)
For one, there's very little footage of this thing.
RAESR had a couple of media visits to their headquarters,
shot an EV commercial in the desert,
and they've taken a few GoPros with them up a canyon. Cool.
But besides that,
we haven't seen much other than concourse events
and we haven't seen anything
that proves the Tachyon Speed's speed.
It's nice to see this thing parked on Rodeo Drive,
but what we really want to see is on the track, right?
And then there's the numbers claims.
Half the media coverage of this car says 1600 horsepower,
but anything more official
says anything from 1200 and 1,250.
That's a big difference.
There's a whole EcoBoost Mustangs
worth of discrepancy in there.
And then finally, there's the outlandish claim
of nearly 4,000 foot pounds of torque.
That's more torque than a 2020 Ford F-350 Power Stroke,
a Ram 3500 with a Cummins Turbo Diesel
and a Duramax Silverado combined.
That would be a real achievement
for the team at RAESR, if it's true.
But despite the limited real-world footage,
despite the crazy number claims
and despite the ludicrous styling
that makes it look like the initial design
must have been done with a crayon,
I believe razor and here's why.
Razor has a few things going for them
that cars like the Lykan and Devel did not.
One of the most important differences
is that the Tachyon is electric.
Electric power is the absolute wild west right now.
(motor loudly whirs)
- [Car Computer] 60.
130.
Quarter mile.
- Power delivery is growing more and more each year
and when the idea for the Tachyon Speed
was conceived in 2014,
a target of 1200 horsepower actually seemed attainable
for an all electric car.
Heck, Rimac had already done it with the Concept One.
And since then electric power has gotten even crazier.
James did a D-list on this awhile ago
and there's a handful of electric cars coming soon
that are chucking out over 1700 horsepower.
Horsepower hasn't really been
a limiting factor for electric cars
since the days of the G-Wiz and the Nissan Leaf,
the limiting factor has always been range.
On their own website, RAESR admits
that the Tachyon prototype
has a limited range of about 150 miles,
but that the final car will have options
with over 300 miles of range.
But as far as the horsepower claims go, the math works out.
The Tachyon uses six electric motors,
two in the front and four in the rear.
Each, they claim, are capable of 300 horsepower.
We add all that up and subtract your parasitic losses,
your voltage sag and your inverter efficiency,
then 1250 is still a conservative estimate
and 300 horsepower per motor isn't a crazy claim.
Standalone Tesla drive units are available
for $10,000 each and make about 300 horsepower.
Now I'm not sure exactly what the team at RAESR is using,
but I'm sure it's capable to what I could find
within five minutes of Googling.
So at least the claim of 1250
is within the realm of possibility.
But making cars is a lot harder
than just sticking a motor in a chassis, right?
Well, RAESR actually has a lot less
to do than you might think.
One thing that really makes Tachyon
more of a possibility than a pipe dream
is that it is a street legal car
that is not designed for luxury.
It's designed for the track.
When a small team is designing a car like the Tachyon
it helps that they don't have to think
about infotainment or noise vibration and harshness
or that pesky little thing called cargo space.
The Tachyon is built on a chromoly tube frame chassis
covered in carbon fiber, not unlike the Altimaniac
that we covered on B2B a few months ago.
When you look at what some of the custom shops can do
for drift, time attack and drag racing,
building a track car from the ground up
doesn't actually seem that far off.
Remember the steering wheel key thing that they had?
Well, from what I can tell,
they're using a MOMO steering wheel with something
like a Haltech digital dash mounted in the center.
That's honestly not too unheard of
and is pretty standard fare for say a GT3 car.
This is basically an off the shelf quick release
with some custom fab work and programming.
Now, at this point,
they sound more like a race shop than a manufacturer.
And that is one of the things
that I think makes this car feasible.
If they're selling this as a track only non-road legal toy,
I would have even less doubts
about them delivering a finished product.
And honestly, I bet the red tape
of making this thing road legal, is a big part
of why we haven't seen much progress on it in five years.
But what about their most outlandish claim,
the 4,000 foot pounds of torque?
Well, it turns out it wouldn't be hard for them to be right.
During the 2020 super bowl,
GMC revealed a brand new Hummer EV,
and also some people played football.
The all new electric off-roader tore through the desert
while big numbers filled the screen.
11,500 foot pounds of torque.
That's more than a top fuel dragster makes,
and GMC is gonna sell that to the public?
It sounded too good to be true.
And then the following few weeks,
many people who are better at math than me
explained that it was too good to be true.
But it boils down to this,
when manufacturers list horsepower and torque of a car,
they list the power at the crank shaft of the engine.
For horsepower, it's a higher number
than what is read at the wheels
because of the parasitic losses of the powertrain.
For torque, those losses apply too,
but since torque is all about turning force,
it also gets multiplied
by the gear ratios in the drive train.
If I was taller and more handsome, like Jeremiah,
I could get way more into this topic, but for now,
we'll just say that if you ever go to a dyno,
person running the dyno needs
to know your gear ratios and final drive and even wheel size
to get an accurate torque reading.
But EVs do not have all those gears,
they have what is called direct drive.
So the motors aren't going
through the same torque multiplication
that an internal combustion engine car is.
Staying with me? Good.
So EV makers have been kind of stuck
when it comes to advertising torque.
Do they list the motor torque,
which is an unremarkable number
and doesn't really represent a feel of what most EVs can do
with that instant torque delivery,
or do they show the numbers in a different way?
The Hummer EV's 11,500 foot pounds of torque
is most likely wheel torque.
The amount of turning force
that one of those 35 inch tires has,
not the torque of the output shaft.
The Tesla Roadster may have also
advertised it's torque this way
with a whopping 7,000 foot pounds.
Not really disclosing that at the motor,
that's probably closer to like 800.
That's still very impressive.
So if we take this reasoning and apply it to the Tachyon,
you can see how 4,000 foot pounds
wouldn't be that bold of a claim
if it's a measurement of wheel torque.
Wheel torque is real torque.
How about that?
But numbers on a spec sheet only means so much
if you're selling your car as a track weapon.
And there's more to building a good track car
than just giving it a bunch of power and Alcantara.
There's a lot of work that goes into aerodynamics
suspension geometry, weight distribution, mechanical grip,
the list goes on and on,
and it used to be that you couldn't really get that dialed
without a wind tunnel, test track and lots of money,
but this is 2022 we're living in.
And while we still haven't figured out
how to solve world hunger or keep PS5s in stock,
testing and building a track car
has gotten a lot easier to do without a big team,
just need some computer skills.
The Tachyon and went through development
using computational fluid dynamics or CFD testing.
While a true wind tunnel might be more refined,
CFD testing is basically
a digital wind tunnel for a computer model.
And since the car was designed using CAD,
it was easy to adjust the design to make the aero work
before even manufacturing a single piece, how convenient.
The bodywork is mostly carbon fiber,
which at one time was a rarefied material.
But today carbon fiber is so common that you can learn how
to make carbon fiber pieces from YouTube videos.
Now it takes a lot more skill than a few Google searches
and a DIY kit to make a full tub,
but compared to what it used to be,
I can't say I find it hard to believe.
All this kind of goes to show how much
the industry has advanced even in the last 20 years
and a company like RAESR could be
in just the right spot to take advantage.
RAESR is a small company with an ambitious goal,
but that doesn't mean they can't be successful.
Just looking at a company like Noble,
a small supercar maker in the UK that set out
to build dream drivers cars and ended up building the M600,
which became a favorite of the "Top Gear" guys
and a revered supercar in its own right.
This is one of my dream cars.
So there's a precedent for a small team
with a big idea making it work.
But what about the whole 1600 horsepower
versus 1200 horsepower thing?
I'm gonna give RAESR
the benefit of the doubt on this one.
I bet that 1600 horsepower was the original goal
and then they pivoted
to something more manageable during the prototype process.
Honestly, that's just so much horsepower,
how would you even tell the difference?
So after going through everything
that RAESR claims the Tachyon Speed can do,
I'm pretty convinced that they could deliver
on what they say, but I fear that by the time they do,
EV Supercars will be another order of magnitude faster
and that's the biggest problem.
EV tech is moving so fast, maybe too fast
for a small shop to keep up.
The Lotus Evija, Rimac Nevera and the Tesla Roadster
all make the Tachyon Speed look
a little less impressive on paper
and if RAESR still hasn't gone in production
by the time those cars launch,
I'm not seeing as many people spend their hard-earned money
on maybe a less impressive car
built by a less established company
for probably more money.
There's still some things that I didn't get to touch on
and I'm a little wary of.
RAESR says they'll have all-wheel drive torque vectoring,
which sounds like a pretty advanced thing to design.
I don't know. It might be outside the scope of a small shop.
But I'd love to give our neighbors a chance
to put me in my place.
RAESR, Eric, Chris, if you're watching this,
we'd love the opportunity to see what your car can do.
- Hey dogs, stop wearing layers upon layers
of Yota's Tacos t-shirts this winter,
just buy the all new Yota's Tacos hoodie and sweat pants.
They're exactly like the shirt
except thicker and with a hood
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Don't be a chilly Billy be a warm Norm.
♪ Stay nice and warm ♪
♪ At Yota's Tacos ♪
- Also, I just want to let you guys know,
we did reach out to RAESR multiple times
to get more help on this video.
They did answer a lot of our questions.
We did want to visit their shop,
but I think it was like a scheduling thing.
What do you guys think?
Can a small company really build a supercar?
Let me know in the comments,
what do you think of EVs in general?
The more I drive, the more I like them.
Follow me @nolanjsykes on all social media.
Sorry about my voice, I feel like it got better.
Be kind. I'll see you next time.