// ARS TECHNICA — HARDWARE & GADGET
The Czinger 21C might be the wildest car we drive all year
This hybrid V8 has organic-looking 3D-printed components and shatters lap records.
The temptation with a car like the Czinger 21C is to treat it as a collection of extreme specifications, and to be fair, it’s certainly not lacking in that department.
At its most basic level, the carbon-fiber-bodied 21C is a hybrid hypercar built around a bespoke 2.88-liter twin-turbocharged flat-plane crank V8 that revs to a searing 11,000 rpm. This power plant is matched up with a three-motor electric system—one electric motor drives each front wheel while a third serves as a crank-driven starter-generator. Combined output is rated at 1,250 hp (932 kW) and 691 lb-ft (937 Nm) of torque.
A seven-speed automated manual transaxle handles gear changes, chosen in part for its low mass and ability to tolerate high torque loads without the packaging penalties of a dual-clutch system. Tipping the scales at under 3,700 lbs (1,678 kg) with fluids, the 21C VMax is capable of hitting 60 mph (97 km/h) from rest in 1.92 seconds on its way to an 8.6 second quarter mile and a 253 mph (378 km/h) top speed, while the road course-focused 21C High Downforce model recently secured lap records at no less than five different California racetracks during a thousand-mile (1,600 km) road trip.
Both its performance and its $2,350,000 price tag put the Czinger 21C in league with the likes of the Koenigsegg Jesko and Aston Martin Valkyrie. But focusing on these figures overlooks what might be the 21C’s most interesting aspect—not what it can do, but how it does it.
Czinger Vehicles was founded in 2019 by the father-and-son team of Kevin and Lukas Czinger as an extension of parent company Divergent Technologies, a Los Angeles-based engineering firm that specializes in generative design software, large-scale metal additive manufacturing, and reconfigurable automated assembly systems. Divergent’s patented technologies have been leveraged by defense and aerospace organizations, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and the US Department of Defense, as well as high-end automakers like Bugatti and McLaren.
To understand what makes this fledgling automaker’s hypercar different from virtually every other high-performance machine on the road, consider how conventional automotive engineering works. Traditionally, a vehicle begins as a set of performance targets and packaging constraints. Engineers then develop components that satisfy those requirements within the limitations of established manufacturing processes.
Those processes—casting, forging, stamping, and machining—impose constraints of their own, particularly around geometry. Complex shapes tend to be costly or impossible to produce using these methods, and mass reduction is typically achieved through iterative refinement rather than holistic optimization.
With the 21C, Divergent’s generative software and additive manufacturing capabilities are used to effectively reverse the order of operations. The process begins with software-driven optimization that defines the structure of a component based on parameters such as load requirements, stiffness targets, crash performance, and packaging constraints. The software iterates through millions of potential geometries, converging on solutions that distribute material only where it is structurally necessary.
The result is a design methodology often referred to as Pareto optimization, in which gains in one area inevitably come at the expense of another until a balanced solution is reached. In practice, this means components are developed to a point where any reduction in material would compromise structural integrity, and any addition would be unnecessary mass. The resulting geometries often resemble branching lattice structures or organic skeletal forms that are more reminiscent of biological growth patterns than machined metal parts. Once a design has been finalized, massive printers can then construct the component from powdered metals.