The Aspark Owl, a 1985-horsepower electric hypercar that has been dubbed the fastest accelerating car in the world, has gone on sale. A showroom opened in Aspark’s hometown of Osaka, Japan, yesterday, and the company is taking orders from Europe and North America as well.
In October, the Owl set a claimed 0-60 time of 1.72 seconds during testing at Misano World Circuit in Italy. Though that time was achieved using one-foot of rollout (typical of many publications’ 0-60 times), it should still obliterate anything in the next lane over. Previous tests of a prototype have alleged a 0-60 time of 1.87 seconds on race tires, but the latest time was clocked with street-legal Michelins.
Production will start with a limited run of 50 units, with 20 planned for Europe and 20 for Asia and the Middle East. That leaves 10 for North America, whose sales will be handled by The Gables Sports Cars, which seems to be a used exotic car dealership in Miami, Florida.
One of the things that seems to be holding the Owl back is that it’s not a dedicated car company. It’s an industrial engineering firm that has built a hypercar as a side project. As such, it has no sales network, seemingly very little in terms of PR or marketing, and an inconsistent website.
Parts of the site still say that the 0-60 time is 1.69 seconds, while horsepower ranges from 2,012 to 1,985. The latter number seems to be more recent, so we’ll go with that. One thing we do know is that the Owl has four electric motors. Aspark says that motor’s rotation speed of 15,000 rpm “should be” the fastest in the world.
The company also says the Owl makes 1,475 lb-ft of torque, has a range of 400km (249 miles), and tops out at 400 kph (249 mph). Back in March, a press release teased a second project from Aspark to be revealed in a few weeks, but as far as we can tell it hasn’t been announced.
If you would like to own an Owl, you can fill out an application on the Aspark website. It’ll set you back $3.56 million at today’s exchange rates. It’s a machine that piques our curiosity, but hopefully the company can get its messaging act together so we can have more faith in the car itself.