There will never be a 2,000PS electric Zenvo

In that time, Zenvo, while suffering the trials and tribulations of the typical supercar upstart, have bucked a trend with their endurance, fighting off a ham-fisted incendiary Jeremy Clarkson to refine their car and stay the course. Development is now beginning on an all-new car to sell for another decade, worldwide for the first time. We caught up with the original Zenvo mastermind, Troels Vollertsen, during this interim period of having his first car buttoned up and finished and his second in the early development stages.

The call opens and there he sits, 17 years on from the founding of his company, with one of the best Zoom backgrounds we’ve ever seen – 2,000PS-plus of Zenvo prototype porn in a crystalline white showroom – ready to talk about a bright future. You can keep the greenscreen fish tanks…

For the man that’s responsible for some of the most extreme supercars of the bygone decade, Troels gives the impression he’s more at home in a workshop than flexing his right foot in neutral on the streets of Central London or Monaco – quietly-spoken, reserved, substantive. We get straight to talk of the future.

A hybrid hypercar to sell until 2035

“We are right now working on a design for a completely new car. It’s the next generation and it’s completely different, but you need to recognise it as a Zenvo when it drives past you. There are some DNA rules you have to follow, like the grille on a BMW or an Audi. I think it will be quite obvious what we’re doing when we show the new car.

“More or less, we are aiming to be in the middle of the spectrum between today’s all-electric and V12 hypercars. For emissions regulations, we cannot go for a V12 or something like it. For our new car, we want it to last at least ten years – 12-15 years from now. All the decisions aren’t taken yet, but I think we will downsize on the combustion engine, and upsize on the hybrid.

"The 918 and LaFerrari are my reference points. Lightweight, powerful, great to drive, special to look at. It will be a successor to the TSR-S directly. It will have a focus on emotions. It will be lightweight, fast, with a near-1:1 power-to-weight ratio.”

So if a free-breathing V12 is difficult to homologate into the 2030s, why not go the whole electric hog? Troels has some strong feelings on the full EV option…

“I don’t want to offend, but for me, a full-electric can’t be a hypercar. I should tread carefully really, but I do not consider a full-electric car a hypercar. Maybe you have 2,000 horsepower, but you’re getting up to 2,000kg.

“I think the best solution is a hybrid. We are developing our hybrid systems now, which still is suiting the car, to combine with hopefully a high-revving mid-size engine. You need that sound, you need the feeling. You didn’t buy it for transportation, you bought it for enjoyment’s sake. You are taking it out because you want some feedback. A hypercar that weighs 2,000kg isn’t enjoyable in that way."

It’s about what the customer does with the car

In an ever-more crowded landscape of super sportscars, it can be difficult to carve out your niche. Troels’ approach with Zenvo, though evolved over the years, is refreshing. His focus is on the experience, of how the car drives. Superfluous top speeds that will never be reached by customers are not of interest. As above, filling the car with heavy batteries and taking away the internal combustion soul doesn’t do much for him either.

Instead, what can he offer to his customers that they can enjoy on a more regular basis? A high-quality, highly personalised vehicle, that performs on the street and the track and that stimulates your emotions is the goal. This motivated the entirely in-house development of one of the only sequential transmissions in use in a road car, for example, and that crazy waggling centripetal wing, that’s both functional and quite obviously, adds to the theatre.

“The market has changed a lot over the years. We had a huge amount of publicity early on, because we were one of the first following Pagani and Koenigsegg to come up. Nowadays, new supercars are coming and going every day, though fewer are going.

“We aren’t trying to compete at top speed. In my opinion, that is destroying the car, with high gear ratios. It doesn’t fit. I think the way we stand out is with the feeling of the car. Yeah, it looks different with a different cabin and a different engine, but it really stands out with the way it drives. It has to be responsive, with feedback. It has to be geared correctly for running on track. You’re not buying a car like this to actually go 450km/h, you’re buying it to have fun.

“The spoiler we developed, people laughed, but it really helps traction and the way the car drives. It’s about the emotional ride. Top speed sells cars but it doesn’t really matter. I am not and never will be interested in top speed.

“I know from our clients, we work hard on the feel of a gearshift, the F1 racecar feel. You can’t have that feeling from a synchro. You can try and make a synchro gearbox as fast as possible but it will still be slow. We start with a race box and try to work it to be more usable and smooth but still with that drama and race box speed.”

Taking things in-house: expensive but liberating

Zenvo began as any other supercar manufacturer does: big claims, big plans but not necessarily with the budget to match. But over the course of 10 years delivering cars, while the look of the TS series has remained an evolution of that original ST1, a lot has happened underneath. The aforementioned aero work and the dog ‘box, not to mention the reworked twin-supercharged engine to replace the super and turbocharged unit in the ST1. 

Over the years, Zenvo has brought a lot of its operations in-house, from the carbon work, to engine and gearbox development and even bespoke electronics. Where other marques lather the side of their cars with the various companies they partner with, Troels is proud of the self-sufficiency Zenvo has developed.

“Our first moulds were made in Germany, we had our carbon fibre made there. But when you’re using suppliers you have issues with delivery time and quality, so we ended up doing our own carbon fibre. It’s an expensive process, but it’s also liberating to do more yourself.

“I don’t want to be depending on a gearbox software developer, where if I need a correction, I need to wait for them to have time to fly in. We took the approach that we are developing all we can ourselves, even the ECUs – our own hardware, software and source code.

“With carbon-fibre, we’ve been playing with it for years and now we’re able to have a high quality and make it ourselves, with different weaves, colours and even fragmented carbon. It’s more expensive but it also gives more opportunities. We are freer to experiment and the time we save on waiting gives us time to develop our skills.”

A point to prove

That infamous test on Top Gear was obviously problematic. Abuse it “like you wouldn’t believe” though Clarkson did, licks of flame coming out of your new car at 8pm of a Sunday night on BBC2 is never a good look. Stressful an experience though it was for Troels, many lessons, not least with regard to carbon build-up in cooling fans that proved to be the cause, were learned. With a point to prove, it’s a testament to the company’s progress and endurance that in spite of what was a PR nightmare, all buyers since have been happy with what they received and that the cars meet a high quality of build.

“You have to understand if you’re starting a car brand, you’re not bathing in money. At that early stage, you’re learning as you go. Though it was provoked – something can always go wrong when you don’t use a car properly – we did let them have it a bit early. But we learned a lot from the abuse the car got. All our stuff is now tested properly. We are spending a lot of time testing parts hard, to be honest, like hell, using the Nardo test facility. We are developing and testing everything that goes into the car as hard as they can be tested for ourselves. We don’t want a situation like that happening again. We’re not proud of that situation, but we learned from it.”

Looking to the future

Eight years have passed since then and the company has moved on. The TSR-S it makes now is a proven machine, with development completely concluded. It’s a purported paragon of quality and a canvas of customisation for one of the five lucky buyers a year that manages to get a hold of one.

So what’s next? Well, this hybrid hypercar, which at this early stage, we can expect to see between two and four years from now. Zenvo has big ambitions, with the car right from the off being developed to be easier to build, in greater numbers, and saleable the world over. The TSR-S doesn’t have US type approval but its successor will. Distributor networks are to be announced, with more information to come before the end of the year.

Me? I never wound up finding Microsoft Excel all that interesting, though as I recall I got a C. That time I wasted learning about Zenvo did, however, in addition to getting the search terms ‘cars’ and ‘supercars’ banned on my school’s intranet, give me a fun opening for this story.

Zenvo, as you’ve read, has come a long way and been through a lot since dazzling 2000s teenagers with fancy renderings on ‘supercars.net’ and the best could be yet to come. The cars are cool, but we like the man behind them. “That white prototype over my shoulder, I built that with these hands. I once did everything myself. I’m not in the workshop so much anymore, as much as I’d like but sometimes I can’t help myself. I do not know how many hours I’ve worked this week and I don’t care. I go home when I’m tired and that’s it.”

Sounds like the right attitude to us...

“You should try and ask my wife…” he responds.