“Electric Cars Can be Fun” – Deus’s Adrian-Filip Butuca on the 2,000 HP Vayanne Supercar

With 2,200 horsepower on tap, but promising an “oasis of luxury,” whilst being limited to just 99 units but hoping to send a message that electric cars are fun – the Deus Vayanne seems to be riddled with contradictions. 

However, for Deus, and its partners ItalDesign and Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE), it’s these contradictions that make the Vayanne attractive to its well-heeled buyers. 

Auto Futures caught up with Adrian-Filip Butuca, Deus’ Head of Design, Marco Volpengo, ItalDesign’s Senior Automotive Business Development Manager, and Dyrr Adash, WAE’s Head of Strategic Partnerships, to find out more about the Vayanne.

The Deus Vayanne’s Discerning Customers

“99 units, whether they are polluting or not, do not make a huge impact on the planet,” says Butuca. 

“For us, it’s more about the message that we send with this car – that electric and alternative cars can be fun, can be enjoyed, can bring instance performance, and also staus with them.”

Whether the Vayanne’s incredibly limited production run will send a message remains to be seen. However, Butuca is certainly right about the car’s insane performance.

For example, 0-100 kph is dispatched in “under 1.99 seconds.”  The top speed, meanwhile, is projected to be 248 mph (399 kph). That shouldn’t be surprising given that the Vayanne produces more than 2,000 horsepower and 1475 lb-ft of torque – significantly more than other high-end electric supercars such as the Pininfarina Battista, Lotus Evija, and Rimac Nevera. 

Butuca’s point about “status,” however, might be more instructive as to Vayanne’s true purpose.

“They are to be perceived as luxury objects, luxury cars in this case,” he explains, “not just pure performance machines that crank out so much horsepower and you take them on the track and that’s it.”

And the Vayannes will give their owners a real kudos and cachet in the already rarefied world of supercar owners. 

No pricing details have officially been revealed but, Butuca previously indicated that you could pick one up for a cool $2.5 million (around £1.9 million). But that’s not all:

“Each of the Vayanne will be a ‘one-of’ meaning that from the 99 units if one customer orders one particular configuration in terms of colour and trim, then the customer after him cannot order it the same,” Butuca says.

“The colour shades and the colour codes will be locked to one single configuration belonging to one single customer.”

Deus Vayanne: When Rubber Meets the Road

Of course, at the moment, this is all relatively hypothetical. The Vayanne hasn’t turned a wheel and people have only ever seen the cars at trade shows.

“We’ve done quite a lot of simulation work – and we’re pretty accurate on our simulations,” says WAE’s Dyrr Adash.

“We get to the ends of programs and it’s amazing how accurate our simulation work is. So, all of the CAE [computer-aided engineering simulation work that we have done to date suggests that we’re going to hit those targets. There are no major concerns from our perspective and everything aligns.”

Deus, of course, is a new car company and while the Austrian startup has picked credible partners in WAE and ItalDesign, it is only right to treat the program with a touch of scepticism.

“Personally, I would say it was a very strong personal connection,” says Butuca about the trifecta of companies working on the Vayanne. 

“Based on this we were able to set the professional collaboration that brought us here. So, in this sense, I wouldn’t say we chose someone but we chose each other – everything came very naturally.”

“Most of our colleagues in ItalDesign have a lot of contact with Adrian-Filip and his team,” says Marco Volpengo, ItalDesign’s Senior Automotive Business Development Manager.

“Our role is to give our technical support in order to make this wonderful idea, this wonderful design idea, become a car and become true.”

ItalDesign and WAE are no strangers, either. 

“We’re effectively the technology partner,” explains Adash. 

“We’ve got a longstanding relationship with ItalDesign going back a few years now and the understanding between the two organisations is really strong. Our offerings are very complimentary.

“The ItalDesign team are incredibly capable in areas where we don’t have the capability. They’ve got a great body engineering and vehicle engineering background. What we’re able to do is take that sort of very high-end performance, high-end technology-driven electrification expertise and apply it here. 

“So, for example, a high power density battery pack, a high power density propulsion system, and novel control mechanisms as well that we plan to have in the future and on this project.”

The Vayanne will be manufactured at ItalDesign’s plant in Torino and the three companies are very confident that it should go without a hitch. 

“The ultra-low series manufacturing is a philosophy of production that is more like islands of production rather than normal series manufacturing,” explains Volpengo.

“So, our plant is already organised for the final assembly of the Vayanne – we don’t need to make any important modification. And, thanks to this architecture, which is a mix of a hypercar and a car which is more of a day-to-day use car, we made the Vayanne closer to the vehicle that we are used to seeing on the street but with these very high power and technology.”. 

Will the Deus Vayanne Make a Difference?

Of course, the big question is whether any of this matters. With just 99 units being made and expected to cost around $2.5 million – is there a chance that the Deus Vayanne will become another white elephant?

The company says that its buyers are interested in the development of electric propulsion tech, rather than just the pure performance itself. Deus is also hoping that, by building an EV with this kind of performance, it will stoke other automakers into abandoning ICE vehicles and focusing on electric motors and batteries. 

After all, if Deus can produce a hyper-fast, hyper-luxurious electric car, why can’t Ferrari or Bugatti?

Volpengo also made clear that the Vayanne’s interior materials were more sustainable and could be recycled. 

“The sustainability and recyclability will be a key issue during the development in the selection of materials. The solution will be to be fully recyclable and we do not kill anymore just for the leather. We are sure that our footprint is greener and one of the targets of the development.”

Perhaps then, the point of the Vayanne isn’t to change the world – it’s to make people think that the world can be changed.