Advertisement
BBC TopGear
BBC TopGear
Subscribe to Top Gear newsletter
Sign up now for more news, reviews and exclusives from Top Gear.
Subscribe
Electric

The Thunder Power is Taiwan's 450bhp all-electric saloon

Is this Frankfurt show oddity quite simply the best-named thing in all of Planet Car?

Published: 15 Sep 2015

This extraordinary machine is called the Thunder Power. It is a thing. A real car, no less, unveiled in a corner of the Frankfurt Motor Show sporting a full electric drivetrain and 450 horsepowers.

It’s the brainchild of CEO Wellen Sham, a man who took over a tooling company four years ago and turned it into the purveyor of excellently-named electric cars.

Advertisement - Page continues below

The name, it’s just… magnificent, isn’t it? “Why the name? Because it’s electric,” Sham explained to TG.com.

Once you’ve gotten over the whole Thunder Power thing – surely a 1980s cartoon castaway? – we can tell you that the chassis was designed by Sham himself.

“We are developing a new technology that is able to blend carbon fibre, aluminium and steel,” Sham tells us. That combination is what the whole thing – chassis and body – is made of.

Sham patented the technology, telling us it’s offers a flexible, modular base, able to scale up to something like an SUV, or scale down to a smaller supercar.

Advertisement - Page continues below

We’ll come back to the supercar thing in a second – he’s going to build one, apparently – because not only did Sham design the Thunder Power's chassis, complete with a multi-link suspension setup, but also the battery pack and motor too.

Horsepower? For the saloon, around 450bhp and 413lb ft. Sham himself admits this figure is not exactly, um, lightning. “It’s not really that much,” he tells us. Still, it’s good for a 0-62mph time of less than five seconds, and a top speed of 155mph.

The Thunder Power is rear-wheel drive, with a range of around 400 miles. Oh, and lots of leather and wood, a huge screen that covers the entire dash and an interior designed by Zagato, Sham assures us.

“We have finished the concept phase,” he says, “and we’re now in the homologation process.”

Top Gear
Newsletter

Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.

It’ll set you back around €65,000 (£48,000) when it goes on sale in 2017, but also of interest is another car sat alongside the Thunder Power saloon – a 1,000bhp Thunder Power sports saloon.

“We’re only planning on making 80 cars of those, as a limited edition,” Sham told TG. “The race car is four-wheel-drive, same drivetrain as the 450bhp version, but beefier. It’s got the same chassis too, but with racing suspension and a different motor.”

That race car and all its 1,000 horsepowers was built “as a showcase of what we can do. We will do a supercar,” Sham says. Expect that at some point in the next few years.

So, Thunder Power. It’ll be built in China, and it’s coming. Try and get the Thundercats theme tune out of your head, we dare you…

More from Top Gear

Loading
See more on Electric

Subscribe to the Top Gear Newsletter

Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, you agree to receive news, promotions and offers by email from Top Gear and BBC Studios. Your information will be used in accordance with our privacy policy.

BBC TopGear

Try BBC Top Gear Magazine

subscribe