Building a 2,000 HP Hypercar from a Blank Sheet

Most people who start car companies have worked in the automotive industry for 20 years. They've climbed the ladder at Ford, GM, or Toyota, accumulated the right contacts, and carefully planned their exit. They know the playbook.

I started Schubert Motors USA because I looked at what exists on the market and thought: we can do better. Not "better for the price." Not "better in this segment." Just better. No compromises. No committee design. No focus-grouped blandness. A car built by people who actually love cars, for people who actually love cars.

Here's how we're doing it.

Starting with the Heart: The Axial Flux Motor

Every great car starts with the powertrain. For us, that meant throwing out the conventional radial flux electric motor design and building something genuinely new.

Radial flux motors — the kind in every Tesla, every Lucid, every electric production car — arrange their magnetic flux radially, pointing outward from the rotor like spokes on a wheel. They work fine. They're well-understood. They're also fundamentally limited in power density because the active magnetic material is distributed around the circumference rather than concentrated in the plane of rotation.

Axial flux motors arrange the magnetic flux axially — in the direction of the rotor shaft. This sounds like a small difference. It is not. It means the entire disc surface participates in torque generation simultaneously. The result: 3-4x the power density of an equivalent radial flux motor, in a package that's one-third the weight.

Our system uses a twin axial flux motor configuration — one at each axle — producing a combined 2,000 horsepower with instantaneous torque delivery. There is no transmission. No clutch. No torque converter. The motors are directly coupled to the differentials through a single-speed reduction gear. The throttle response is, genuinely, telepathic.

The challenge wasn't the motor design itself — axial flux motor theory has been understood since Michael Faraday. The challenge was threefold: thermal management, power electronics, and manufacturing.

An axial flux motor producing 1,000 HP per axle generates enormous heat in a very small volume. The stator windings are bathed in direct oil cooling — a system originally developed for Formula 1 — pumped through microchannels machined into the stator housing. The rotor discs are air-gap cooled with forced convection from ducts integrated into the carbon fiber subframe.

The power electronics were the harder problem. Controlling 1,000 HP per axle requires switching silicon carbide MOSFETs at frequencies and currents that most automotive-grade inverters can't handle. So BAMF Semiconductor — our in-house chip design arm — is developing a custom SiC inverter controller ASIC optimized specifically for the axial flux motor's switching characteristics. This chip alone represents a year of design and simulation work, and it's the kind of vertical integration that makes established automakers nervous.

The Carbon Fiber Body: Sculpted by Physics, Refined by AI

The Cyclotis body was not designed to look good in a showroom. It was designed to produce 1,200 kg of downforce at 320 km/h while maintaining a drag coefficient below 0.32. The fact that it looks like a fighter jet that escaped from a museum is a happy side effect of the physics.

We started with computational fluid dynamics simulations — hundreds of them, iterating on surface geometry using an optimization algorithm that trades off downforce, drag, cooling, and aesthetic constraints. The AI doesn't design the shape; it explores the design space and surfaces Pareto-optimal tradeoffs. The human designers then pick points on that frontier.

The body panels are all carbon fiber — not carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (which is what most "carbon fiber" cars actually use), but prepreg carbon fiber laid by hand and cured in an autoclave. This is the same process used for F1 chassis and aerospace components. A single body panel takes 48 hours from layup to finished part. The entire body shell — doors, hood, roof, quarter panels, front and rear fascias — weighs 87 kg total.

Why AI-Optimized Aerodynamics Changes the Game

Traditional aerodynamic development is a loop: designer makes a shape, CFD engineer runs a simulation, designer adjusts, repeat. Each iteration takes days or weeks. With AI-driven optimization, we run hundreds of simulations in parallel, each exploring a slightly different geometry, and the algorithm converges on optimal solutions autonomously.

This isn't just faster — it finds solutions that humans wouldn't think to try. The Cyclotis's rear diffuser geometry, for example, has a compound curve profile that no human aerodynamicist would have drawn on paper. It looks wrong. It works perfectly — the pressure recovery curve is almost exactly the theoretical ideal for a restricted-underbody diffuser.

The AI also optimizes for manufacturing constraints automatically. It knows that certain surface curvatures can't be laid up in carbon fiber without wrinkling. It knows that certain underbody geometries would scrape on speed bumps. It encodes these as constraints in the optimization problem, so every solution it surfaces is actually buildable.

The Numbers That Matter

For context: the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport produces 1,600 HP from 4,000 lbs. The Rimac Nevera produces 1,914 HP from 4,740 lbs. The Cyclotis produces 2,000 HP from 2,910 lbs. Power-to-weight matters more than any other single number, and ours is in a different league.

The Production Challenge

Building a prototype is easy. Building 99 identical hypercars — each one meeting the same tolerances, the same quality standards, the same reliability targets — is the actual challenge. This is where most startup car companies fail.

Our approach is counterintuitive: we're not trying to build a factory. We're building a workshop. The Cyclotis is assembled by teams of two technicians who stay with the car from bare chassis to finished vehicle. Each pair builds about one car per month. The logistics are handled by the same supply chain that feeds Detroit's established automotive ecosystem — our custom stator windings come from a precision motor shop in Warren; our carbon fiber prepreg comes from a composites supplier in Troy; our brake calipers are designed in-house and cast by a Michigan foundry.

The tooling costs for a traditional automotive production line run into the hundreds of millions. We've avoided that entirely by designing for low-volume manufacturing from day one. The carbon fiber molds are CNC-machined from aluminum billet — expensive per mold, but each mold produces dozens of panels, not hundreds of thousands. The wiring harnesses are built on pegboards by hand, not on automated assembly lines. Every part is designed to be produced in quantities of 100, not 100,000.

What Comes Next

The Cyclotis is the flagship — the statement piece. It proves what we can do when there are no constraints. The Foundry 427 applies the same technology to a more accessible price point. The GT-1 bridges the gap between road and track. The Sovereign brings the technology to a luxury SUV platform. And the Velma exists because sometimes you just want to be aggressive.

But the car is just the beginning. The Axial Flux motor technology scales up for commercial vehicles, down for motorcycles, and into entirely new form factors we haven't announced yet. The SiC inverter controller ASIC has applications far beyond automotive — anywhere that needs to switch high power at high frequency, from grid storage to aerospace. And the AI-optimized aerodynamic design methodology is a standalone software product that other manufacturers are already asking about.

We're not just building hypercars. We're building the technological platform for the next generation of American automotive manufacturing. And we're doing it in Detroit — because that's where the people who know how to build cars actually live.

How to Get One

We're accepting refundable deposits for priority production allocation. The first customer deliveries are projected for late 2026. If you want to be on the list, reserve your allocation. Fair warning: we're building 99. When they're gone, they're gone.