Arash previews Imperium hypercar | GRR
What’s this? Another anonymous all-electric hypercar from a company you’ve never heard of? Not quite. You might recognise Arash, the manufacturer behind this, the new Imperium, which means ‘Absolute Power’ in Latin.
Arash has actually been around for some 21 years, building boutique supercars in of all places, Newmarket, in Cambridgeshire. Remember the lovely Farboud GTS? An Arash by another name whose design was eventually sold on to Farbio and then Ginetta. Then there are the Arash-branded supercars, the AF8 and AF10. The AF8 has even been seen in action at the Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard. What Arash has not done is sold cars in the biggest of numbers, or garnered the widest of coverage.
The Imperium, then, is the company’s first all-new car since the AF8 in 2016 and it really is new. To appearances, it shares nothing with its siblings, instead resembling a pie-in-the-sky rendering you might see in your Instagram timeline. It really does look like a hypercar from 2031, not 2021.
There will be three versions, each with different power levels. The Imperium E gets one 800PS (600kW) electric motor. The Imperium gets two and the Imperium S gets four. Yes, four 800PS electric motors, though what the total system output will be is unknown. We doubt it’ll be the sky-high 3,200PS (2,400kW) figure you’ve just worked out. For reference, the new Tesla Model S Plaid has a total system output of 1,020PS (760kW).
All versions get an 800-volt system architecture, with 50kWh and 100kWh battery options. The battery is described as “water-cooled 3d-printed polymer matrix, embedding 1,865 cylindrical-type cells”. The 100kWh battery is claimed to weigh 450kg.
The chassis is all carbon and depending on how many motors you get, your Imperium will weigh either 900kg, 1,200kg or 1,150kg. Those are all… impressively light figures for BEVs.
Just 75 are to be made, split into five launch editions, 20 Imperium Es, 25 Imperium, 20 Imperium S and five Imperium final editions. Hell’s horses… What we don’t have are prices, power figures in PS, performance figures or dates of when the Imperium will go into production. It looks cool, sounds cool and Arash has a history of actually getting its cars to run, so we’ll see.