Orient Express

You know, sometimes, you just have to find out. And in that process you may find yourself doing something which, on paper, appears to have little logic behind it. Like driving for six hours to drive a Chinese EV for comfortably less than five minutes.

I know too that a review of a Chinese EV is not high on the list of stories you’d choose to be reading today, even if it is a hypercar with over 1500bhp and capable of reaching 60mph from rest in less than two seconds. Indeed, the very fact it has so much power and is so fast may serve merely to compound the reasons you don’t want to read this story; you’re a discerning cove, you know what matters and this isn’t it. Because you know as well as I how devalued the currency of power has become in the EV era and that no principle, in this case that faster is better, is indefinitely extendable. Eventually it will turn around and bite you on the arse.

You will also be aware you are not alone: people not only don’t want to read about electric hypercars with quad digit outcomes, they don’t want to buy them either. By its creator’s own admission the Rimac Nevera has been a sales flop, while neither Pininfarina nor Lotus has said a word about how many Battistas and Evijas have been sold, into which it is safe to read ‘not many at all’, because if they had, you can bet every hair on your head they’d be shouting it from the rooftops.