You know, it's just so easy to drive. You know, a lot of times when you build, when you drive, not necessarily prototypes, but sometimes one or two all supercars, it's kind of a kit car feel to it. I don't get any of that here. None of that.
Well, Jay's got the hang of it now. You know, I don't know why I assumed the red line was like, uh, you know, 6,500 or 7,000. It's 11,000. All right, that—that's a sale right there. Love you. Thank you.
One minute of Jay Leno's Garage. The cars we're featuring today, two amazing American-built supercars. They're amazing for a really unique reason, and I will tell you that in just a second what that is. It's called the Zinger. This is a company I've been following for a long time. We were kind of there at the ground floor when they started. This is big-time manufacturing. It's really sophisticated. It's literally a 3D-printed car.
Correct. The entire vehicle is designed here, and that entire powertrain between the electric motors and the V8 are printed and integrated into the structure using a digital system.
And every promise they made has been kept, and it's truly an amazing automobile. These are for sale. You can buy them in California or any state in the United States. That, to me, is what makes it amazing. But we'll find out more. Let's meet the founder and CEO, Lucas Zinger. Lucas, come on in, my friend.
Oh boy, this is just an amazing accomplishment. And the thing that makes it amazing to me is every supercar that comes here, well, we're waiting for certification. It'll be legal in California in six weeks, and it never comes. It's a tough standard to meet. I mean, the most exotic Europeans who can't meet it at all, they don't even try.
And you built this car and you built your own engine, which to me is the heart of, you know, when I see a major automobile manufacturer and they're using somebody else's motor, why don't I just buy one of those cars? To me, the motor is the heart. It's the soul of the automobile. And you designed and built your whole engine, and it meets CARB testing, all emissions. That's truly an amazing feat. So I can, you know, it's fun to design it and make it go fast and put a manual gear and all those kind of things, but the fact that you can actually do the business part of it, get it to meet every goofball, some good, some bad rule, it's just amazing. So I pat you on the back for that. It's, yeah, it's really impressive. When you buy this, you have no problems with the DMV.
Well, wait a minute. There's only 15 numbers in the, uh, in the... Yeah. Well, we set out to build an American OEM, right?
And the secret is, if you're building an OEM, you have to go through the full regulatory side. And that is actually the hardest part, right? It's actually much easier to design and build a fast car than it is to certify it for road use, both in terms of emissions and safety. So we did over 40 crash tests with this car, went through California carbon emissions, and we're globally homologated. So you can sell this in Europe, you can sell this in the Middle East, you can sell this in Asia as well. And that development means that you actually have the engineering capability to create a car that is now inside an American area.
I would guess content-wise, this is probably the most American car built in this country. Isn't it fair to say?
Pretty close, I would say. So I would say so, because you do everything right down the street here in Torrance, California.
We're based in Torrance. We engineer the car. We manufacture the car. So it's both engineered and built here in California.
Now we have two cars. Both of these are legal. This is the downforce model, which I guess we would call the track model, if you will. And this is the road version. Basically same engine, same performance, pretty close.
Yes. Same architecture underneath in terms of strong hybrid, three electric motors, big V8 in the back in terms of output but small in terms of size. So very power-dense V8, and they share that platform but uniquely different in the body, in the aerodynamic performance. So V-Max will do over 250 mph, right? 21C high downforce, we're limited to about 220 with the big wing, the front splitter, but we'll set every track record in California while being road legal.
Yeah, but you can go around corners a little bit better.
Yeah. And if you're doing 220 in California, you're going to jail. So I got to go with this model here.
Here's the amazing part. Why don't we start with the frame?
You know, it's so funny. It looks to me as if somebody just poured liquid metal. And this is all 3D printed, correct?
Yeah. Well, this is what a load-optimized but perfect part looks like. So this is a design where you're looking holistically at the requirements for the car and engineering to that specific load case, to that specific set of requirements, and then having a manufacturing process where you can actually put material just where you need it, right? And you don't need to put any other material because the manufacturing process allows for that geometry to be created. So we take requirements in, we engineer to the Pareto-optimal structure, so the most efficient structure it can possibly be, and then we additively manufacture using powder bed fusion. This is laser melting of powdered aluminums and steels and titaniums. It's the most advanced way to make a metal part in the world. Then we robotically assemble it to a very close tolerance.
Now is this a powder coat or is this the natural metal finish?
That's the natural metal finish.
Okay. So it doesn't need painting or rust proofing or any...
No. So we have a very low silicon content in our material. So we actually do incredibly well with corrosion. This is a material that can see almost marine environments.
This is a patented material.
Yes, this is an aluminum-based alloy. So about 90% aluminum, 10% other elements, but no rare earth materials in there.
And it has both the elongation, right? Our crash bumper itself is printed, right?
To take energy and absorb it, but then also it has the necessary stiffness and durability to take the high cornering forces, the pothole cases, etc. So it has both the material properties required.
Well, here's the thing I find fascinating here. You can disassemble it. You know, a lot of times I'll see people that make a chassis and it gets bent in an accident or damaged, and that's it. Sorry, you need a new chassis. Mhm. You know, the car is totaled. Basically, this obviously unbolts so you can get the... Well, let's forget the motor in and out.
Yeah. So you think about a product, not just a technology, right? We're making something that we want our customers to enjoy, that we need our dealers to be able to service, and therefore access is designed in, but designed in upfront. So the software and the engineering team is looking where do I create those split lines for service, but where can I also split the part in a low-load area so I'm not adding mass to that plane. So engine service, the rear frame on the bottom drops out as well. And then we have a very nice connection to the carbon fiber monocoque as well.
This whole thing just unbolts. Yeah, this is great. And I can see where you put extra... extra metal here, for lack of a better word.
Yes. Uh, just to add a bit more structural rigidity.
These points right here, they actually hook straight into the rear wing on the 21C high downforce, and these will take about 5,500 pounds of downforce at 200 miles per hour.
Boy, that's pretty amazing. Yeah. The suspension, of course. Very nice.
Yes. Inboard pushrod suspension, double A-arm there. All additively manufactured.
Now you do your own rotors.
So we are not doing our own rotors, but our own calipers. So when you look at the wheel carrier plus the caliper on this chassis, this is something we call the brake node. And it's far lighter, it's higher performing, and it's going to be on the future Zinger vehicles.
So it's not on either of these yet, right?
But coming in the future, you will actually see Zinger have its own brake system on these cars.
So when I order one, it'll have those.
Okay. Well, I, you know, I'm just so impressed with this. It really is. And it's fun that it's American-made, and I don't have to learn a foreign language to talk to the engineer, and it's great. And we're talking dual-clutch gearbox, single clutch...
Single clutch, but with the EV system, you're essentially torque-filling on the shift, and you've got a twin-barrel on that seven-speed AMT. So when you're driving, and we'll drive later, you'll see it doesn't feel like a single clutch. It feels closer to a DCT, but with the weight saving of a single.
Now, the EV does not spin the wheels, right?
It spins the front wheels.
Oh, it spins the front wheel. Okay.
Okay. So we do 500 horsepower out of the front axle, and it's an independent electric drive for each front wheel. And then we do another 750 horsepower out of the V8.
So how do you drive the...
Yeah. So in here is where our EV motor will sit. And you'll essentially see, you know, this is just the chassis, but you'll see a pushrod come out of... into the EV motor.
Yeah. So we're not seeing all the bits, right?
That's confusing. Okay. Is it all-wheel drive all the time?
So yes, you have four drive modes. You can actually go in EV only, and you can be front-wheel drive. When you come into sport mode or track mode, then you have power on all four corners: V8 driving the back wheels and the EV motors driving the front wheels.
And a seven-speed gearbox.
And a seven-speed automated manual transmission gearbox. And actually a really significant gearbox in that it was a casing designed by us, additively manufactured by us, and then the gears and the actuation was done in partnership with Xtrac. And it's the first electro-hydraulic actuated gearbox in the market, and it's the first that has this twin-barrel design where your shift times are very, very fast.
Very impressive. Yeah. It's just a beautiful-looking... It doesn't look like any chassis of anything I've ever seen before. And that's the Divergent part, right? That's the...
Yes. So Divergent supplies this chassis to Zinger, but Zinger really helped pioneer that technology, right?
Right. Because I remember seeing this, and it was built in a factory not much bigger than this room.
And I was like, well, how is that possible?
So we've built out what we call Area 21 now, which is where we build the 21C, and you'll have to come see it. It's about 70,000 square feet now, so it's grown a bit. That's where we do the full general assembly of the vehicle, and we've delivered over 20 cars out of that facility now.
Oh, that's great. And again, I hear no problems. I hear no, 'I got a Zinger and the wheel fell off and they won't,' you know. I mean, because you know, just by the nature of having this TV show, being a car guy, I hear everybody's complaint, you know, and a lot of problems. Some you believe, some you go, 'How's that even possible?' But I've never heard that. I've met owners at car shows. 'How do you like it?' 'Great.' 'Any problems?' 'No.'
Okay. We intend to keep it that way. And that comes from a focus of both motorsport but OEM engineering, and then a lot of aerospace engineering. And if you're in the space industry or the defense industry, you know, failure is not an option, right? And that bled into our culture as well.
And it must be frustrating to you to hear from skeptics all the time, because you can't blame people for being skeptical. I mean, I grew up in the era when, oh, Jaguar come out with a V12, Jaguar XJ220, but now it's got a V6. I got no... the Vector. Oh, it's got to be the most powerful. What Vector? But, you know, I mean, a lot of hopes and dreams die when it's time to do the work.
Yeah. I mean, that's the truth. It's a business has a lot of dreamers and a lot of engineers. And when you have more dreamers than engineers, that's where the product suffers very quickly from there.
Okay, let's get back to the motor. Now you build your own engine, because motor means electric, doesn't it? So let's say engine. How many cubic inch? How many liter?
We're 2.88 L, so we're under three liter.
Yeah. That's nothing, is it?
Yeah. It's incredibly small. And the reason for that is the unique layout. We went for this inline seating: driver, passenger, inline. And we want to be in front of the rear axle because we still want to be a mid-engine car, right? And that means where the engine can sit in this package is incredibly narrow. So you're looking at about three liters of space, and we designed the 2.88 L to deliver. But you need a lot of power, right? This was a car that was all about road driving, but we also wanted to be able to set these track records. So we knew we'd have to get at least 700 horsepower out of that V8. We've gotten 750 in our base car and 850 on our Blackbird edition.
So it's 2.8 L, four valve, four cam.
Four valve, four cam. Correct.
Designed in-house from scratch, and all the way through California carbon emissions.
I don't even know how that's possible. It's just amazing to me how frustrating it must be to build something and then it doesn't pass, and then you got to go do it again. Just the machinations you go through. Just crazy.
Iteration and resilience. Yeah. And really people, right? The team is what brings this to life at the end of the day.
To me, that's the heart, like I said, of an automobile. You know, TVR, I kind of had a thing going with them for a while because they built their own motor, the Speed Six, and turned it sideways. And good for you. You built your own motor. You're not just putting a boutique car, Brembo brakes, somebody's motor, somebody else's. You know, it's great that you build it from scratch. Let's get back to the car. This high-downforce model intrigues me here because obviously this is for somebody who's going to be going to the track on a regular basis.
Yeah. If you're running 250 on the street, you're not going to be out there very long. This green carbon fiber is just unbelievable.
We call that rattlesnake green.
Yep. It's got a California heritage to it. But we actually broke the Goodwood hill climb record in this spec for the first time.
So this green color became quite famous after that hill run. And now we've got a lot of customers that are looking for the same exact on their car.
Yeah. I've done that Goodwood hill climb. And you go fast, but not that fast. So downforce doesn't really play a role, does it?
Say with the amount that we have on this car, anything over about 60 mph, you are going to start seeing the impact. So that first turn even, we're seeing some impact from the downforce kit here. Even when we drive later, I think you'll feel the difference of having the rear wing and the front splitter on this car versus the V-Max.
And how much downforce is that?
So we're doing over 3:1 lift to drag. And on the rear wing, we get about 5,500 lb of downforce at 200 mph. So it's an incredible amount that's loaded on the rear of the vehicle, but the whole surface of the car and the ground effects are designed for this aero package.
Now, this rear wing fastened to the chassis?
Yes. So there's pins that hard mount into the back of that additively manufactured structure, and it's a direct hard connection.
Yeah. Because I sometimes see cars, and if this is mounted to the rear body structure, I go, 'Well, where is that going to fail first?' You know, they're never going to get fast enough to... and it's going to break.
Yeah. So this is like the GTD Mustang. It's... it's firm. Yeah. It's very firm.
And talking about fixed aero and functional aero, I'm going to invite you, Jay, to test that front splitter.
See, if this is one of those Karate Kid movies, I'd be the bully and you'd be the karate kid. And hey... and I would go, 'Hey, wait a minute. What?'
And I'm going to join you on there.
Boy, that's pretty amazing.
So that is full function, right? Form follows function.
And that's how you can take thousands of pounds of downforce.
Wow. That's... yeah. Yeah. That's pretty amazing. That's... wow. All right.
I can't get over this green. It really... rattlesnake green, huh?
Yeah. So the full body is carbon, every single panel. So even the painted cars, they're full carbon underneath. And we use the carbon for the aero surface, right? The structural load is going into the chassis, right, through the wing, through the splitter, and this is really just giving you your profile. All your crash is really coming through that additively manufactured structure as well.
I have another question about California CARB. If you have this thing, how many miles do you have to run the engine? How many miles do you have to do? Do you have to run like 50,000 miles? I mean, what do you have to do?
For California CARB emissions, you mostly need to show in all drive modes that you're within the emission standard. So actually the hardest part is not the distance part. Yes, there's a durability for thousands of miles, right? But there's also the initial startup of the vehicle. The startup is actually one of the most tricky corner cases of emissions. So when you first turn the car on after it's been sitting, what is the immediate emissions profile? And there we've gone to actually a heated catalyst system. So our EV drive will start up first, we'll heat the cat, and then we'll start our V8. And all of that together then gets us through the emissions profile.
And how long does that heat take? Just a few seconds?
