The Super-Fast Electric Sports Car Designed By A 23-Year-Old

The Concept One: it's good looking and technically promising, but three feet thick with hyperbole. Its builders say the electric supercar will have 1,088 hp, 2,802 lb-ft of torque and a theoretical top speed of eleventy trizillion (give or take). Count Von Koenigsegg, call the front desk.

The Concept One is the brainchild of 23-year-old Croatian designer Mate Rimac, who developed the electric Koenigsegg competitor from an egg crate and six cans of Krylon Red Pepper. (Actually it's an aluminum frame and carbon-fiber body). Four electric motors, controlled in separate front and rear sectors can, in theory, get the Concept One from 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. If that seems slow, consider the degree to which the controller must fiddle with the motors' prodigious torque to get the tires to hook up. Theoretically speaking, of course.

Also theoretical is the Concept One's charge range, which Rimac has said is 366 miles from a 92 kWH battery. Though at the car's theoretical top speed of 189 mph, you can theoretically expect a bit less than that.

Still, the car's electric motors system is geek love in mechanical form, with two liquid-cooled permanent magnet electric motors — each with a liquid cooled inverter unit — and two reduction gearboxes. Sure, we'd love to see this thing stretch its legs and lay two fire trails across a runway somewhere. For now, though, here it is, rotating inside a diorama at the Frankfurt motor show, where a show model wanders aimlessly around it, keeping the dream alive.