DEVEL Sixteen, driving on a road

Will locals remember the day a 5,000 horsepower Gundam car drove into town?

When DEVEL (Defining Extreme Vehicles Car Industry LLC) turned up in 2013 with a prototype hypercar said to have a V16 engine with turbos and 5,007 horsepower, the world figured a prankster had made a series of hilarious typos throughout a bogus press release and none of it could possibly come to pass. ha ha

Every day since, the DEVEL Sixteen has been getting more real. It exists, is happening—and a prototype of the production version is out cruising Italian roads near the company's engineering base.

DEVEL hasn't released specifications on the model tested, but with a choice of V8 or V16 engines and numerous headline-grabbing stats (see the @iamted7 post below), the test drivers did well to avoid ending up in the rhubarb…no matter what was under the engine cover.

The only thing left for DEVEL is to start making more of them.

On behalf of future drivers everywhere: "…what was that thing??"