This is what happens when a Silicon Valley startup gets around to making a supercar for the future. Nvidia unveiled the world’s first “superchip,” the Tegra X1., earlier this week. The incredibly powerful chip will be used to power Nvidia’s Drive infotainment system, which will offer a cutting-edge car computer. And the first result is here in the form of the stunning Renovo Coupe, a $529,000 electric supercar.
Thanks to Renovo’s partnership with Shelby American, the Coupe itself looks stunning, a two-door GT-style sports car based on the 1964 Shelby Daytona. Yet there are no cylinders or carburetors under the hood, no exhaust pipe sticking out from behind. The Renovo Coupe is completely electric, boasting three lithium-ion battery packs placed strategically to balance the 3,250-pound car and two electric motors generating 400 kilowatts. The range for the car will be 100 miles, says Renovo, while the charging time for the lithium-ion battery pack will be 30 minutes using a fast charger or five hours from a level-2 charger.
The Renovo Coupe has almost 1,000 sensors running on five integrated CANs, and to harness that much information Renovo reached out to NVIDIA to see what it was cooking up in its lab. The result is the first car powered by the X1 chip, processing data and displaying it on both the instrument cluster and new the 11.6-inch touchscreen on the center stack. The new chipset and the rendering engine behind it solves those problems, providing enough horsepower to not only crunch the data, but using NVIDIA’s real-time rendering software to make changes on the fly.
Christopher Heiser, Renovo’s CEO, says they’re still set to begin production this year and they’ll be taking deliveries of a few more chassis to develop both road models and track models for testing.
