What a thing! I came in cynical and left really impressed! It comes from the right place and speaks to all the things I love about cars and driving.
Jethro Bovingdon
This is actually the birth of a new supercar... Just looking it over, it seems extremely professionally well done. This is from the ground up, bespoke motor, the whole vehicle, actually.
Jay Leno
Thirty years of progress made cars faster, safer, smarter and more refined. But sterile. The NILU puts the soul back into the machine.
Credit: TVFX
Every modern interior begins with the same assumption: the driver needs assistance. The NILU begins with the opposite premise: the driver is competent. The car’s job is to respond, not to intervene.
A 315 mm steering wheel, closer to a 1990s Formula 1 wheel than anything currently in production. Round, deliberately, so the rim slips cleanly through the hands in a power slide.
Driver and passenger sit shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, at identical heights. The experience belongs to both.
Tungsten inserts in the knob: the only place on the car where weight is added on purpose. Every shift lands precise and deliberate, with a weight you feel in the palm. Reverse sits behind a lockout. Going backward is a decision, never an accident.
A solid billet, reduced until only the essential remains. Not assembled. Excavated. Every void is deliberate.
Decades of comfort, compliance and digitalization have produced impressive horsepower figures and lap times, but engineered out the visceral shock that defined the supercar: the holy sh*t factor. The NILU brings it back.
The NILU draws from many worlds at once: vintage Le Mans prototypes and Bertone’s radical geometry, Bauhaus and mathematics, American muscle, Ken Block and JDM, and the brutal precision of Meshuggah. None of it is quoted directly. All of it is present.
The aim was a car that feels inevitable: new, and yet strangely familiar. That only happens when nothing is applied for effect, and every line has a reason to exist.
Beauty in the eye of the beholder is nonsense. True beauty is an absolute. It is not created. It is uncovered.
Every great mechanical watch exposes its movement because hiding that much craft would be a great injustice. The Nilu27 / Hartley V12 follows the same logic. The NILU has no engine cover: the engine was never meant to be hidden.
A clean-sheet 6.5-liter V12, naturally aspirated and developed exclusively for the NILU: 1,070 horsepower at 11,000 rpm. No turbocharger, no hybrid assistance, no gimmicks. Mated to a seven-speed manual from the Italian artisans at CIMA.
The open bay is also an engineering solution. A mid-engined hypercar has to get rid of an enormous amount of heat; most do it with vents and ducts cut into the body. In the NILU, the Hot V layout routes the exhaust up between the cylinder heads, and the heat rises straight out of the open bay. No trapped heat, on a mountain pass or standing in traffic. What fascinates the eye is what keeps the engine bay cool.“Aggressive cams, optimized port flow, lightweight components, exotic materials. We built it to raise a cold sweat every time the V12 fires up and screams.”Nelson Hartley, Hartley Engines
The lower tub carries everything. Crash safety, torsional rigidity, occupant protection: all of it depends on the carbon monocoque alone. Oversized sills, bulkheads and tunnel are integral load paths. Nothing is decorative. Nothing is redundant.
Stiffness of the tub in isolation is not the number we care about. The NILU is calculated as a complete chassis, because that is the only number the driver actually feels. The seats are bonded directly to the tub, dropped into a recess in the floor to set the occupants as low as the structure allows.
The suspension follows Formula 1 practice: double wishbones with pushrods, front and rear. At the rear, the wishbones are extremely long and run through the open engine bay, with the pushrod, rocker and KW damper technology fully visible. That length is what gives the car its precision.
The structural cross-car beam is the dashboard. A straight aerospace-grade aluminum extrusion, left to right, no curves, no styling gestures. Pure Bauhaus.
Credit: Nils Piirma
Full specs
Pilot Sport Cup 2 R tires.
Carbon-ceramic brakes.
Co-developer of the Nilu27 / Hartley V12.
Manual transmissions.
Damper technology.
Carbon composites.
The Nilu27 / Hartley V12 has run for the first time. Watch the first fire-up on the dyno.
Credit: Benoit Fraylon, SantooshHosted by Luxury Rally Club, the NILU made its GCC debut at a private gala dinner at The Meydan Hotel, Dubai.
Jay Leno takes a first look at the NILU with founders Sasha and Inna Selipanov on Jay Leno's Garage.
