In what might be the longest-running automotive tease since the TVR Griffith reboot, the mythical Devel Sixteen has been spotted in China. And like most legends that finally step into the light, the reality is somewhat different from the myth. Cast your mind back to 2013. Barack Obama was president, "Blurred Lines" was inexplicably popular, and at the Dubai Motor Show, a company with possibly the most try-hard name in automotive history - Defining Extreme Vehicles Car Industry LLC - unveiled what they claimed would be the most powerful car ever made. The Devel Sixteen promised 5,000 horsepower from a quad-turbocharged 12.3-liter V16 engine and a top speed of 348 mph. Fast forward to 2025, and after more delays than a British train service, a Devel Sixteen has finally been spotted in the wild. But here's the plot twist that absolutely nobody saw coming (except everybody who's ever followed vapourware supercars): it's not actually packing that mythical V16. Instead, what we have here is what appears to be the "entry-level" version, powered by a turbocharged V8 making a mere 1,500 horsepower. I say "mere" because in a world where Bugatti's new Tourbillon exists, 1,500 horsepower is what you'd expect from a particularly enthusiastic hot hatch. The car was spotted cruising through a Chinese intersection, making the kind of turbocharged V8 noises that suggest this particular example is more Mustang than Millennium Falcon. Reports suggest this isn't even the first one - apparently, a Japanese collector got their hands on one earlier, also with the "budget" V8 option. Now, it's worth noting that the V16 engine wasn't completely fictional. US-based Steve Morris Engines was actually developing it, and there were photos of it on a test bench. Whether it ever produced anything close to 5,000 horsepower is another matter entirely - that's the kind of power that would make even Bugatti engineers need a lie down. What we're looking at here is either the world's most elaborate bait-and-switch or the most optimistic automotive project since someone thought putting a rotary engine in a family car was a good idea. The Devel Sixteen promised to be the hypercar equivalent of a Chuck Norris joke - numbers so ridiculous they couldn't possibly be real. Well, they weren't. Real that is. Today, the Devel has around 1500 ponies kicking about under the hood. It's just that this is 2025. Hypercars are throwing around four-figure hypercar numbers like confetti at a wedding. In that respect, the Devel's 1500 HP tag seems almost modest. The real question isn't whether the V16 version will ever materialize (it won't), but rather why anyone would spend what we assume is a significant amount of money on what essentially amounts to a very expensive piece of automotive vaporware. Then again, in a world where people pay millions for digital artwork of bored apes, perhaps a hypercar that promised the moon and delivered a small hill isn't that strange after all. At least it exists, which is more than can be said for most automotive unicorns. And who knows? Maybe somewhere in a workshop in Dubai, that 5,000-horsepower V16 is still being developed. Though I suspect we'll see pigs flying through Tower Bridge before we see that particular version on the road.
