- Hey, remember that part in "Furious Seven"
when Dom and Brian break into that vault in the skyscraper?
- You realize what this is? Lykan HyperSport.
- I'm sorry, a what?
- Lykan HyperSport (slow motion)
- Back in 2015, I had never heard of the Lykan HyperSport,
which was weird because I was watching a lot
of Top Gear at the time
and that made me very qualified.
After seeing Dom deadlift
and drive this thing out of a building.
I wanted to know more about the rare
and presumably very expensive...
- Lykan HyperSport
- Well, it's been five years since I left that movie theater
and we still haven't seen the Lykan
in a drag race or set a lap time
or do anything that proves it's a real hypercar.
So I got to ask why you lying Lykan?
What's the deal?
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- [Nolan] The Lykan HyperSport is a car
made by W Motors over in Dubai.
I'll let Brian give you the specs.
- $3.4 million, zero to 60 in less than three seconds.
There's seven of these things in the world,
and this guy keeps it locked up in a vault
- To get a little more specific.
The hypersport has a claimed 780 horsepower,
diamonds mounted in the headlights,
gold in the stitching and the seats,
a holographic infotainment system,
and if that's not enough to make it worth $3.4 million
it comes with a free watch as well.
W motors claims that the hypersport
is the first supercar to be designed
and produced in the middle East.
It's got a mean face, suicide doors,
and huge vents all over this thing.
With looks that aggressive,
you'd expect a mean engine note,
but here's where it gets weird.
If you look at the promo videos of the Lykan
on W Motors own YouTube channel
almost none of them show the car with the engine running.
That's weird, right?
Of the little footage W Motors does have
the clips are ramped up to a higher speed.
They're literally making the car look faster than it is.
This is a Cardinal sin.
It feels like W Motors is covering something up.
Like there's something about the car
they don't want us to see, right?
Many of the YouTubers that have been allowed
drive this car have never really been allowed
to ring it out.
And there's no footage anywhere of anyone
thrashing this thing or even just
flooring it off the line.
This is where you might start
to write-off the Lykan as vaporware.
Cause if they're not going to show us how good the car is,
must not be that good at all, right?
But when you dive a little deeper beyond first impressions,
that's where the story gets wild.
First, Let's look at some of W Motors claims about this car.
W Motors claims that the Lykan makes 780 horsepower
from a flat six engine or do they?
Cause here's the documentary about the Lykan
that says...
- [Narrator] 770 horsepower.
- [Nolan] And here's a marketing video that says 750.
So which is it?
Did he make three versions of this car?
I guess that's why their website says the car does
zero to a 100 kilometers per hour in 2.9 seconds.
Their official teaser says 2.8
and their CEO gave an interview saying it's...
- [CEO] 2.6 seconds.
- It may not seem like a lot
but when you're talking about acceleration, that's quick.
Three tenths of a second is a big difference.
That's the difference between a $200,000 Porsche
and a $1 million Porsche.
But maybe that was all just typos
or the marketing team screwing up.
A number you can't screw up
is how many you've sold
especially when you only plan to build seven of them.
And they're all individually numbered
using cool looking Arabic characters,
right over the engine Bay.
In that documentary series on W Motors YouTube channel,
they state that in December of 2013
the first Lykan was sold
to a quote undisclosed middle Eastern buyer.
That's not unexpected.
I'm sure someone in Dubai would want to have
number one of seven in their collection.
But I'm not so sure that's what actually happened.
Because here's footage of number one of seven
in Monaco in 2014, being driven by the W Motor CEO.
Maybe their anonymous buyer just let them borrow it
and borrow it again to take it to Monterey in 2015,
and then let him paint it red in 2016
and then let these YouTubers borrow it in 2017?
This thing looks like it's making the rounds more
as a promo car than a customer car.
And what about the claim that the Lykan
is the quote first supercar designed
and produced in the middle East?
Sure, the company is based in the middle East,
but the car was built at Magna Steyr in Torino, Italy.
And while the styling might be middle Eastern
the heart of this beast and the cage
was built in Germany.
Critical components such as the engine,
transmission, suspension, and in fact the whole chassis
are designed and produced by German manufacturer Ruf.
And they aren't even bespoke parts.
They're all pulled from the Ruf CTR3.
Don't get me wrong, the CTR3
is a very cool and capable supercar,
but at $750,000, it means the Lykan is
kind of like a $2.6 million body kit.
And while it may be a body kit made of expensive components
the actual assembly of these pieces
isn't what you'd expect.
The diamond set headlights look less like
they were assembled by high-fashion jeweler
and more like a 14 year old with a bedazzling gun.
Sorry, that's just being honest.
And when you compare the cabin
to the cockpit of the Pugani Huayra,
you start to see what a multi-million dollar car
should look like.
The Lykan has got me questioning so many things about it.
I'm not even sure if the (beep) are real.
Please, don't sue me.
But what are you going to do?
Take the car to an appraiser
and have them open up the headlights?
But at least the car has some performance, right?
Because W Motors also stated they were starting
a motor sport division in Birmingham
where they'd be competing in GT racing by 2017.
(wind blowing)
- Where's that?
With all this interesting stuff going on
combined with the fact that 70%
of the company's business comes from consulting
it's hard not to wonder about
the man behind it all, Ralph Debbas.
Ralph is a Lebanese auto designer who started W Motors
in 2012 at the age of 25.
When you hear Ralph Debass talk,
he speaks in superlatives.
Every sentence has the word first or only or best in it.
And sometimes when he says those words
they aren't exactly true.
But if you listen to him talk about the Lykan
and ignore the bold claims about innovation and quality,
you'll notice something else.
He describes the design of the car
from a metaphorical and symbolic standpoint only.
Ralph talks about how the design reflects a moving animal
or a pouncing Wolf or how the symbolism
of the number seven is crafted into the bodywork
but he never talks about it from a technical perspective.
He never mentions aerodynamics or cooling
or weight distribution or anything like that.
No mention of anything that would contribute to performance.
I don't think it's a stretch to wonder
if this thing has ever seen a wind tunnel.
YouTuber Mr. JWW shot a pretty sick video
with the Lykan, a Ferrari 488, and a Mclaren 650S
driving up a closed road in Ras al Khaimah.
After that video,
he said that the Lykan couldn't be in most of the shots
because of overheating issues.
Now I'm not an aerodynamicist,
by any stretch of the imagination,
but I'm pretty sure if your bodywork is just for looks
and doesn't funnel air to your radiators
to cool your rear mounted engine, it's going to overheat.
But despite all these fishy details,
I don't think the Lykan HyperSport was a scam.
Ralph does not talk like he's hiding something.
He's excited about the car
and he's excited to see it driving.
So I have a pretty simple theory
that might explain the high strangeness behind W Motors.
It's that Ralph Debass is not a car guy,
at least not in a traditional sense.
Take a look at his Instagram.
There's not a single post about a car
outside the context of W Motors.
There are photos of traveling, nice dinners,
fine wine, friends, but not cars.
Ralph is a fan of luxury, status, exclusivity,
and he set out to make a car that ticked all those boxes
that he and people like him cared about.
And he did, the Lykan HyperSport is a supercar.
Cause any multi-million dollar car has to be.
Compare Ralph Debbas to Christian Von Koenigsegg
another CEO who started a boutique HyperCar company
in his 20's and makes limited run multi-million dollar cars.
Both men talk about what they're passionate about
and what they love about their own cars.
Koenigsegg talks about the technology
and the re-imagining of power delivery.
While Debass talks about his design language
and how expensive the materials are.
Imagine looking at two paintings,
one is very detailed and realistic
and took incredible skill to make,
and the other is a bucket of molten gold
spilled on a canvas and then left to cool off,
which is more valuable?
And more importantly, which is more valid?
This is the kind of argument that has been going
on in the art world for decades
and hasn't really reached cars before.
Cars are functional, they're utilitarian.
And because of that, we measure their worth
by how well they function against each other.
So from that perspective,
it's easy to think that someone is dumb
for spending $3.4 million on a car
that can get beat by cars that cost
less than a 10th of that.
But when you take performance out of the equation,
that argument doesn't really hold up.
So where did we get so turned around on this car?
Why did we ever think this car was about
lap times over clout in the first place?
Is it just because it looks quick?
The car does what it's supposed to do.
It's unique and rare.
It looks stylish and it's a status symbol.
It's literally the furthest thing there could be
from my kind of car, but it wasn't made for me or you.
I've got a bit of a hot take here.
I think it's appearance in "Furious Seven" is the reason
people think it's a scam.
The film showcased it as a high tech hypercar
with performance that was criminal
to keep locked away.
- Nothing's sadder than locking a beast in a cage
- But it's not, it's a car for people who think
that hyper cars should have diamonds in the headlights.
And that is certainly not Dom Toretto.
Turns out, that display room in the Dubai high rise
was actually the right place for this car, all along.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around
buying one of these.
Because even if luxury and opulence was your style,
there are more luxurious offerings
from Pugani, Rolls-Royce, and Bentley.
But I don't think that I could justify
even buying one of those.
So there's gotta be something else
to having something that is one of seven.
And it's just expensive for the sake of being expensive.
Kind of like how a $100,000 watch doesn't tell me time
any better than a Casio calculator watch,
but people buy it because it's a $100,000.
But if there's seven niche billionaires
that the Lykan was designed for,
then who's W Motors new car for?
W Motors is now selling the Fenyr SuperSport.
Like the Lykan, it is built on the Ruf CTR3 platform
and is basically the same
but without all the diamonds and holograms.
It's being limited to a hundred units
and is an absolute bargain at $1.5 million.
But it looks like this one
actually has some functional aero on it.
So maybe it'll cool properly.
And a lot more footage is out there
of it actually being driven hard.
It feels like W Motors is very publicly
and very expensively going through that R&D
that should have happened before the launch
of their first car.
Look, at the end of the day, we all love cars.
But some people like different things about their cars.
It doesn't mean that they're wrong.
And I think the Lykan is a perfect example of that.
Remember that app for the iPhone,
when the iPhone first came out?
It cost like a thousand dollars and it didn't do anything.
It was like literally called the I'm rich app.
This is almost like that.
- Donut just hit 5 million subscribers on YouTube.
- And we're so grateful for all the support
that the donut community has shown us over the years.
- Every meme, every piece of fan art.
- Every more power, baby, we see in the comments
fuels us to bring you more stuff.
- And to celebrate this monumentous occasion...
- We're releasing this limited edition sticker
that says..
- Hey! I was there when Donut hit 5 million.
- [Man In Blue Sweatshirt] Now you've only got seven days
to order one at donutmedia.com
And then we're never going to make it again.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, never.
- You guys are the reason we make this stuff.
Seriously, Thank you so much for being here.
- Thank you guys so, so much.
- It means the world to me.
5 million people, I literally can't even
imagine that number very well.
- Honestly, Donut changed my life.
Uh, thank you guys so much for all your support.
Uh, I love you.
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