Aim EV Sport Concept Is Small but Mighty Showcase for Designer Shiro Nakamura

• Nissan’s global head of design for nearly two decades, Shiro Nakamura, is behind this attractive rear-driven coupe concept called the Aim EV Sport 01.
• At the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K., the concept will make its debut and Aim’s CEO will tackle the festival’s timed Hill route in it.
• For now there is no plan for Aim, a startup motorsports engineering company, to produce the car, but you never know.

One of the more interesting debuts at next week’s Goodwood Festival of Speed is set to be this Aim EV Sport 01, a handsome rear-driven electric coupe which combines 483 horsepower with a claimed weight of just 3150 pounds. It is the work of a Japanese motorsport engineering company and we’re told that there are indeed plans to put it into limited production.

But before we get into the details, can you work out where the EV Sport 01’s designer used to work? Take a couple of minutes to look at the pictures before we drop the spoiler.

Now pat yourself on the back if you were thinking of Nissan’s sports cars. The EV Sport 01’s styling is the work of Shiro Nakamura, Nissan’s global styling boss between 1999 and 2017. During that time he led the development of projects as diverse as the Cube, Murano, Juke, and—probably most telling here—also the R35 generation of the GT-R sports car. After retiring from Nissan in 2017, Nakamura set up his own company, and the EV Sport 01 is one of the first projects.

Though the car was originally intended to be a billboard for Aim’s engineering talents, the company now says that it’s investigating the possibility of creating a limited production run. We don’t know where in the world those would be sold.

Aim was founded in 1998 and has worked on projects including a V-10 engine for endurance racing. The LMP1 Oreca 01, which finished the 2010 Le Mans 24 Hours in fourth place, used one.

Like many companies, Aim is looking toward a fully electric future, with the EV Sport 01 intended to showcase its talents. It features an aluminum frame, a carbon-fiber central tub, and front-hinged doors. At 153 inches in length, it is fractionally shorter than a Mazda Miata, but despite its diminutive size the EV Sport 01 carries 81.0 kWh of battery capacity, split among four packs. At the rear it has individual motors to power each wheel, allowing for torque vectoring. There are no performance figures yet, but the power and weight figures suggest it should be impressively potent.

Aim’s CEO, Yukinori Suzuki, will be showing what his company’s new product is capable of at the Goodwood Festival of Speed July 13–16, where he will be driving the car in a timed category on the 1.16-mile Hill route. We hope to be able to tell you about production plans soon.

European Editor

Mike Duff has been writing about the auto industry for two decades and calls the UK home, although he normally lives life on the road. He loves old cars and adventure in unlikely places, with career highlights including driving to Chernobyl in a Lada.