This V12 monster put the hype in hypercar at the Festival of Speed

The Aurora that we saw in motion for the first time during the 2025 Festival of Speed is the product of a wholesale reinvention of Zenvo, one that seeks to break the brand away from the somewhat uninspiring trend of power over passion.

It was back in 2021 that newly appointed Chairman and CCO Jens Sverdrup, formerly of Koenigsegg, laid out a brand-new vision for the company that would set it apart from the ever more diluted hypercar space.

We caught up with him during the Festival of Speed to find out more about Zenvo’s new era, and how the Aurora is going to help shape an interesting future for not just the brand but potentially hypercars in general.

“Internally we call it Zenvo 2.0, almost to the point where we could have rebranded completely. With the Aurora everything's new from scratch. I think it's the world's most from scratch hypercar ever, there's nothing bought off the shelf. Everything’s designed either for us or by us.”

And built by a team of roughly 150 enthusiasts who are in the business for love rather than money. It’s true in this case that the car reflects the passion of the manufacturers.

“It’s still a very small team and a lot of long hours, but everyone’s buzzing. We were talking a couple of weeks back, me and our CTO Jon [Gunner], and I was like ‘have you asked anyone to work overtime?’ He said ‘no, everyone's just doing the work.’ We haven't had to ask anyone."

“It’s of course highly appreciated to see, touch, hear and get a live update of where we are on development. Had we have gone to a static motor show we’d never have got that opportunity, so the Festival of Speed is a perfect event for it.”

“Internally it was a huge deal. It's emotional, there were tears, there was a lot of anxiety, because I feel like I took a risk with the company, and at the same time I've decided that we as a company are transparent, no smoke and mirrors, what you see is what get. If the car failed, we wouldn’t come up with a lie, we would tell people exactly why.

“That’s something I decided when I came onboard. This is us, Scandinavian, full transparency because that's our culture. It's a calculated risk, you're still super anxious, you want to make that one run at least.

“We had one problem on the second run, and that was something as mundane as an off-the-shelf steering wheel and we couldn't get out of second gear, but apart from that no overheating, no nothing. It’s been good.”

It’s a remarkable accomplishment considering the car had undergone only 90 minutes of testing ahead of its debut outing on the Goodwood Hill, but it’s part of the Zenvo philosophy that customers should be allowed to experience the development as it happens.

As part of that, we got to hear the Aurora for the first time when it was officially launched at the Festival on Thursday morning with the first public start-up of that fascinating modular V12 engine. The Mahle powertrain has been developed specifically for use in the Aurora, running under the premise that it will be the most powerful street-legal V12 in the world.

It’s a plug-in hybrid, quad-turbocharged 6.6-litre engine mated to three electric motors producing a maximum output of 1,850PS (1,360kW), which will be road legal in both Europe and the US. The headline is of course its modularity, Zenvo is already working on plans to produce a V10 version in future years, but the promise of another howling V12 being released into the wild is something we, and Sverdrup himself, are very much looking forward to.

While we haven’t yet heard the Aurora running at its full 10,000rpm potential that’ll come later in the year if all goes well), even its note on startup hit us with substantial intrigue.

“It doesn't sound like any other. Well, up high it does, it sounds like a banshee, but you haven’t heard that yet. It's important for me to have a mechanically quiet engine, not a lot of mechanical valvetrain noise. The exhaust is literally straight out of the box.

“It has four small turbos and they don't really kick in until late, so there's a lot of inlets to create this big, massive, boomy sound. Your body vibrates standing next to it, it’s loud but not shrill. It becomes shrill over 7,000rpm, it starts to scream like the Cosworth V12s.”

The sound was a surprise to the engineers, too, who also didn’t quite know what to expect from this extraordinary design.

"It’s a very good entry point to start tweaking, because we will tweak the exhaust sound. It could be a lot louder if we wanted to.”

There’s a bit of work still to go until the Aurora can be fully unleashed. Though, while it’s complex enough, Zenvo is going into painstaking detail on every single element.

“We're also developing our own gearbox. It’s a race gearbox, that's why we’re pushing the car because it has an on-and-off clutch. It’s a hand clutch like a race clutch, you can’t feather it, you just have to do 3,000rpm and dump it.

“By December 2025 we’ll be running all systems go, something that's relatively close to production spec. That's when we’ll see the full potential of the car.”

As it stands, the plan is for us to see the Aurora again at the Festival of Speed in 2026. The car made its dynamic debut in limited form in 2025, but Sverdrup has made a promise that it’ll be back in capacity next year.

“I made the Duke a promise last year. He was looking at the show car, and I said next year we'll be driving. Now I’ve made another promise, that we’ll have the two cars [Aurora Tur and Aurora Agil] going up the Hill here next year at full chat, screaming their lungs out.”

We’ll hold you to that Jens.

Photography by Joe Harding, Raife Smith, Steven Stringer and Jack Beasley.