Piech EV sports car scooped, can recharge in five minutes

An expensive and exclusive new battery electric sports car with a super-fast charging system and strong links to Porsche has broken cover in Europe.

Piech is a Swiss EV start-up founded by Anton ‘Toni’ Piech, the great-grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and son of former Volkswagen Group leader Ferdinand Piech.

The plan revealed in 2019 at the Geneva motor show was to have a two-seat sports car on-sale by 2022.

Previewed by the Mark Zero concept, that car now appears to have reached the prototype testing phase, as a story and photos in Auto Motor und Sport highlight.

The German fortnightly captured the Piech indoors and judging by the photography, the production version remains true to the concept.

Piech doesn’t appear too upset by the scoop as it has sent the story and some comments out to its press mailing list.

“It was clear that this moment would come sooner or later: we were confronted with questions relating to images of our rolling prototype,” the Piech statement noted.

Piech co-CEO Andreas Henke was then quoted: “So yes, we’re driving. Yes, we are damn close to the study from Geneva (even if there are still a few nice changes to come).

“Yes, we are going full steam ahead. Yes, we are on the right track overall. And yes: we can be taken seriously, saying what we’ll do and then doing what we said.”

The most interesting part of all this appears to be the magazine witnessed the Piech’s 900 volt charging system in operation and it does appear to work.

The battery and charging technology is developed by a Hong Kong company Desten Group that Piech claims can recharge 80 percent of battery capacity and achieve a 400km range after just four minutes 40 seconds.

The vehicle’s maximum range is expected to be 500km (WLTP) from what is reported to be a 180kWh battery. The battery pack uses a chemistry that only requires air cooling (most EVs have liquid cooling systems), saving about 200kg and lowering the weight of the Piech to 1800kg.

“It only takes about five minutes at the company’s own fast charger and around eight minutes at a standard Ionity charging station to jam 80 percent of the possible charge back into the battery,” auto motor und sport wrote.

“This has now been tested by three renowned institutes, including the Esslingen University of Applied Sciences, where the author studied engineering. So, it would appear plausible. In fact, the entire charging process actually took only about five minutes, and the new player wants to guarantee 3000 cycles of its cells.”

In addition to the charging speed, Piech is also claiming a sub-three second 0-100km/h acceleration time. The price is expected to sit somewhere above 170,000 Euros ($275,000).

“We want to build a genuine no-frills driver’s car that offers top performance and workmanship,” said Henke.

“The new technology means that we can dispense with a water cooling system for the drive battery, reducing overall weight by a good 200 kilograms.

“At the same time, our car consumes less power and can regenerate much more. Up to 0.6g of deceleration will be able to be purely electric – a real game changer.”