In an automotive era where safety, sanity, sustainability, and responsible eco-friendliness have taken center stage, enter Nilu27, stage far-right. America's newest V12 hypercar is designed explicitly to have no frills, no digital, no driver aids, and a lot of heavy metal in mind. The frontman behind the Nilu is Russia's , an automotive visionary with some staggering exterior designs in his portfolio, including the , and .
But as pretty as the Nilu might be, this car may best be defied by what's missing. Selipanov says no to electric motors, to hybrid engines, to batteries and to traction control. No to active wings and suspension.
No to stability control, navigation, driving modes, and even no to such feeble luxuries as an AM/FM radio. Instead, he says yes to carbon fiber monocoques, to aluminum subframes, to big analog gauges. Yes to shift gates and to steering wheels without any knobs on them.
Yes to the days when reaching up to adjust your side view mirror to see or reaching across to the passenger side to hand crank the window was the only way. Yes, then, to the raw feel of driving a barely-controllable hypercar as fast as humanly possible – this machine is a viscerally stripped-back appeal to the desires of our lizard brains. Selipanov has designed the most bare-bones work of high-functioning automotive art we've seen in a long time.
The exhaust, too, looks to be a sculpted work of art rather than merely a "hot-V" port to excise the combustion demons from the fiery be.