Talking Supercars with Shiv Sikand / Drako Motors
This article is adapted from Our Future: Looking Beyond with Michael Sikand, a podcast that features exciting conversations with leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs for college students to learn about the future of business, technology, and policy and get access to elite career advice. Listen to the full interview at the soundcloud link below, and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts for more great content.
You have to be pretty crazy to launch an electric supercar startup...
Santa Cruz-based engineer and entrepreneur, Shiv Sikand, EVP and Co-Founder of Drako Motors, was passionate enough to do it.
In August 2019 at Monterey Car Week, Drako Motors debuted the 2020 Drako GTE, a 1200HP, quad-motor, electric supercar that rockets to 0-60 in a time of 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 206 MPH.
The Drako GTE premiered in August 2019 at The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering
As to why he and his co-founder, Dean Drako, embarked upon the journey to produce a supercar, Sikand points to the advent of electrification.
“You know, it really is no small endeavor, but we took this on because we realized that the advent of the electric car and advances in software technology created a new world of engineering possibilities for exhilarating performance, precision handling and higher safety.” Sikand said. “These possibilities can be applied both on the road and on the track to deliver exhilarating vehicles”.
Sikand sings about his love for all-wheel drive cars and admires rally racing, a kind of superhuman sport that sees drivers drifting cars at breakneck speeds through dirt, gravel, and snow. In summer 2019, he and Drako drove the toughest endurance rally road in a 1969 Peugeot 504, making the more than manly drive from Peking China all the way to Paris (he wants to do it again). But he’s quick to explain why his car’s control system differs from the AWD setup in your Mom’s Subaru.
“Traditional all-wheel-drive cars contain three differentials in the front, the rear, and the center to split power. Now, to eliminate oversteer and understeer, we must be able to deliver positive and negative torque to each of the four wheels. With the Drako Motors four motor solution and sophisticated software algorithms, we can apply this positive and negative torque to control the exact drive to each wheel to give a level of control impossible with traditional mechanical differentials.”
So what is it like to actually drive the Drako GTE? Sikand first noted that is a rather hard experience to replicate with words.
“The key differentiator of this car is the way it turns. Of course, it has incredible power. Amazing acceleration. But it's the turning capability here….You turn in and you can actually get onto the throttle post apex way earlier than all the cars, because the torque vectoring allows you to really pull the car around the corner.”
The design of the Drako GTE was penned by Lowie Vermeersch, Creative Director at Gran Studio in Turin, Italy. Vermeesch, who hails from an artistic clan in Belgium, was lauded for his work at famous design house Pininfarina, where he drew up the Ferrari 458 Italia, one of the most iconic sports car designs of the modern era.
“I think very early on in the process, you know, Lowie clearly understood the design intent that Dean and I wanted, which was a G.T. car that harked back to a previous time where we had these long bonnet cars” Sikand said.
The 2020 Drako GTE
A defining part of the Drako GTE is the customizability of the driving experience. There are four switches in the car, called the Quatrro Manettino, that allows the driver to precisely tune the vehicle’s characteristics to the driving experience at hand.
“The switches essentially allow you to control the front to rear bias. And that's from a power perspective. We can actually control how much power is delivered. So you can go from being a symmetrical wheel drive to fully rear wheel drive, if you like” said Sikand. “There's additional control which allows you to select the surface, another control that lets you select the mode. The final one lets you control the lift off. Regen bias. So when you lift off that paddle, you can dial in exactly how much braking regen you want and you can dynamically play with it”.
The Quattro Mannetino features several driving modes.
Sikand believes strongly in the electric car as a solution in creating a greener planet, mainly because we can centralize emissions rather than having particles pour out the exhaust pipes of every moving car in the world. He alludes to the emissions scandal perpetrated by Volkswagen.
“We're really good at building power stations and controlling base emissions at the power station, I believe electrification is the key to controlling and reducing localized emissions from vehicles” Sikand said. “We’ve seen that if you allow, you know, every vehicle to emit and then try and control that, whether it's with software or scrubbing devices or whatever, there's potential for large scale abuses we have seen.”