This Is One Of The Craziest Cars Ever Made

In the pantheon of ‘80s supercars, excess was the primary driving factor filling the heavenly halls—Ferraris in music videos, Lamborghinis on posters, and Porsches roaring down Pacific Coast highways—one car promised to rewrite the rulebook entirely. Not with old-world charm or Italian romance, but with the energy of a dragon made out of laser beam razor blades. That car was the Vector W8.

If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. The Vector W8 promised to slice the Earth in half. It was fast, it was wild, and it was American. It was also a failure. A beautiful, brash, and ultimately doomed dream that has slipped into a kind of mythological obscurity, whispered about by collectors and admired from behind velvet ropes. But back in 1989, the W8 wasn’t supposed to be obscure. It was supposed to be the supercar of the future.

A Space-Age Dream From LA

The man behind the Vector W8 was Gerald Wiegert, an industrial designer with a jawline made for a Time magazine cover and the unshakable and delightfully silly belief that the United States could beat Italy at its own game. Wiegert founded Vector Aeromotive in the 1970s and spent more than a decade hyping what would eventually become the Vector W8. His vision was to blend aerospace technology with automotive power—to make a supercar that didn’t just go fast but felt like it had been built to blast off to the nearest star system to show them how radically we do it over here on Earth.

From the outside, the W8 looked unlike anything else on the road. Its wedge-shaped body was brutally angular, built almost entirely from carbon fiber and Kevlar composites. At the time, these materials were more common in fighter jets than Ferraris. The rear end was dominated by deep slats and ducts, wings and fins. The front looked like it could slice through radar.

Inside, it was no less wild. The cockpit was an ode to digital futurism: a jumble of aviation switches, a digital dash lifted from a spaceship in a B Movie, and a seating position that left drivers low, tight, and wrapped in techno-plush. The Lamborghini Countach was extreme, but it was still rooted in its Italian pedigree; the Vector W8 was not encumbered by such things as history or anything other than equations about drag coefficients and whatnot.

The Numbers Were Real. Mostly

Beneath that audacious shell lived a 6.0-liter Rodeck V8—essentially a heavily reworked Chevy small-block—fitted with twin Garrett turbochargers. Vector claimed the W8 produced over 600 horsepower and could rocket to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds. Top speed? Over 200 mph, at least on paper. Wiegert was never overly concerned with his claims being super accurate. Sometimes those claims included zero-to-sixty in 3.2 seconds, sometimes 2.9. The truth is harder to pin down, partly because so few people ever drove one hard enough to find out.

Vector W8 Performance Specifications

Even if the numbers wavered, the performance was no joke. The W8’s raw speed was matched by its startling rigidity and handling, thanks to that aerospace-inspired chassis. But there were caveats. Cooling was an issue. So was the build quality. The car’s electronics were temperamental; the cabin would cook under the California sun thanks to the long, flat windshield. Driving the Vector required a combination of patience, trust, and a willingness to ignore blinking dashboard warnings.

Still, there was nothing else like it. It was rare, strange, and intimidating in the best way. Celebrities bought in. Andre Agassi famously picked one up—only to return it after discovering it wasn’t ready for the kind of performance Wiegert had promised.

Related

10 Supercars That Outran Ferrari—And Got Ignored Anyway

Ferrari has been a household name when it comes to speed for decades, but there were other underrated rivals from the time that were still as fast.

No One Knew What To Do With The Vector W8

That moment with Agassi captures the W8’s core problem. It was too early, too strange, and too ambitious for its own good. When the car finally hit production in 1989, after nearly a decade of teasing and delays, it was already fighting uphill. Ferrari had the F40. Porsche had the 959. Acura had just launched the NSX. Each of those cars had pedigree, reliability, and support. Vector had only Wiegert.

To his credit, Wiegert was a visionary. But he was also stubborn, sometimes secretive, and often too focused on controlling every detail. He refused to let Vector become just another car company. He wanted a movement. And he refused to compromise.

That meant delays, cost overruns, and missed opportunities. The W8’s base price started around $250,000—nearly half a million in today’s money—and yet it often felt unfinished. Vector promised cutting-edge everything, but what customers got was often plagued by poor fitment, clunky software, and, as you might guess, a never-ending parade of maintenance nightmares.

The Inevitable Demise Of An Intriguing Manufacturer

Production was painfully slow. Just 17 cars were built between 1989 and 1993. Then it all unraveled. Wiegert was ousted from his own company after a messy corporate takeover by Indonesian manufacturer Megatech, which also owned Lamborghini for a brief stint in the ’90s. Vector tried to follow up the W8 with the M12—a rebadged Lamborghini Diablo, sort of—and promptly collapsed under the weight of its mission.

Related

A Lamborghini Diablo-Powered Vector Is One of The Last of a Dying Breed

Allegedly, it has been designed and built specifically for the Prince of Brunei

Nobody Cared—Until They Did

For years, the W8 languished in that weird zone of automotive purgatory—too rare to be remembered, too flawed to be cared about. But something changed. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it was the rise of the gross cartoon YouTube car culture that is driven by views and nothing else. Regardless of why, somewhere in the last decade, the Vector W8 went from an ambitious failure to cult icon.

Honestly, it’s easy to see why. The design still looks like it’s beaming in from the future. The specs, even now, remain impressive. And unlike the Ferraris and Lamborghinis of its era, the W8 isn’t a known quantity. It’s an artifact. Every one of them is different. Each one has a story. These things are a mystery, each unto itself.

Auction prices have crept up accordingly. What was once an obscure relic is now a high six-figure collector’s piece. Not because it was good at being a car, but because it wasn’t. The Vector W8 is a reminder of what happens when you chase the dream too hard and too fast. It’s fun because Wiegert went for it–like, really went for it and failed.

Related

Hidden Treasure: The Mid-Engine Supercar You Can Buy For $50,000

This British sports coupe offers Ferrari performance for the price of a new car in 2025.

The Radical American Supercar That Never Stood a Chance

In retrospect, the W8 was never really about the numbers. It was about the gesture. The idea that America, in the wake of the Cold War, could still summon something mad and muscular from the desert. It wanted to prove that you didn’t need heritage if you had vision. That you could build a supercar from scratch using aerospace engineering and moxie.

Gerald Wiegert passed away in 2021, but his creation lives on—rare, misunderstood, and more relevant than ever in a world obsessed with ease, perfection, and sterile, algorithmic design. The Vector W8 was an abject mess. It wasn’t even finished. But it was cool, and I think that counts for something.