Is Lister building an EV hypercar?

By topgear, 10 February 2020

Lister might be about to start work on an electric hypercar. Because obviously.

On Sunday, while you lot were in bed, it tweeted a render of a low-slung, very Jaguar-y-looking hypercar with the caption “A Storm is coming…”, no doubt referencing the tremendous V12-engined Lister Storm of the early Nineties. Beneath the image itself you’ll see the words “Lister EV super car [sic] research”. No, we didn’t just pluck that headline out of thin air…

The new render is quite different from the old Storm – a blocky, wonderfully Nineties GT that, at the time, had the biggest V12 engine fitted to a road car since World War Two. The racers competed against Mercedes CLK GTRs, 922 GT1s and so-on, and were never massively successful.

Since the current owners took over in 2013, Lister has mainly been tuning Jaguar F-Types, though now it’s doing F- and I-Paces too. It’s also built a handful of ‘new’ Lister Knobblys – the Fifties Jaguar-engined racer that really made the company’s name. Last year Lister signalled its intention to build a Ferrari Monza-rivalling Speedster, while back in 2014 company boss Lawrence Whittaker told us the company would definitely build a 1,000bhp multi-million pound V12-engined hypercar to compete with the likes of Pagani and Koenigsegg.

Watch this space…