RARE, RARER, RAREST
STORY | Autumn Nyiri
PHOTOGRAPHY | Petersen Automotive Museum & Rami Garcia
What do you get when you take an exclusive automobile—an ultra-rare, track-focused hypercar—and give it a bespoke paint job by a sought-after artist, auction it off to benefit one of the world’s premier automotive museums, and then have an innovative engineer build it into a street-legal driver’s dream? The result is a truly spectacular one-of-a-kind vehicle that has stories to tell even before its tires meet the pavement.
The story begins with a car—the all-electric NIO EP9. The EP9 was the first car released by NIO in 2016 after the brand was formed by Chinese automotive manufacturer NextEV in 2014. The EP9 was designed and hand-built in England using knowledge and componentry from its parent company’s Formula E racing program. The chassis is influenced by contemporary Le Mans prototype design. The car is powered by four electric motors with four individual gearboxes, one for each wheel. Its aerodynamic carbon-fiber allows the car to generate a total downforce of 2.7 tons at 150 mph. A massive air channel runs down the center of the vehicle, working alongside an active three-position rear wing to help achieve the car’s 3g cornering force. Each side of the front bumper has large air vents that can lead the cooling air for its high-performance electric drive components and brake systems. NIO’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO William Li and Dr. Martin Leach’s (Former President of NEXTEV) emphasis on user experience and high performance set a strong foundation for the design of the EP9.
The EP9’s stats are impressive: a top speed of 194 mph and a whopping 1,360 horsepower, with a 0-60 mph acceleration time of about 2.7 seconds. In 2017 an EP9 set the autonomous lap record at the Circuit of the Americas at 160 mph, as well as a lap record on the famed Nurburgring Nordschleife in Germany. Though built for track use, the EP9—with only 16 examples planned—is intended to showcase the technology NIO seeks to use in a line of road-going consumer vehicles.
In 2021 the Petersen Automotive Museum showcased a 2019 EP9—the first on American soil—in the first iteration of its exhibition Hypercars: The Allure of the Extreme. The car was a stunner. And the relationship that developed between the Petersen and the team at NIO bore fruit beyond the loan of that vehicle to the exhibition when, in 2022, NIO donated the body of a 2022 EP9 for the Museum to auction off at its annual fundraising gala. But this would be far more than the beautiful body of a hypercar—the EP9 would become a literal work of art…an art car. NIO was on board with adding a one-of-a-kind paint job, so they, along with the Petersen Museum, set about finding the perfect artist to take the vehicle from ultra-rare to utterly unique.
The art car phenomenon developed within various subcultures in the 1960s, ranging from the psychedelically painted VW buses favored by hippies to the elaborate and intricate paint jobs of Southern California lowriders. BMW initiated an official Art Car program in the 1970s, with vehicles being decorated by artists Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, among others. Since that time, art cars have increased across the country with the development of innovative display venues such as Burning Man and festivals celebrating art cars such as San Francisco’s ArtCarFest, the Art Cars of Houston parade, and large gatherings of these highly decorated vehicles on the East Coast and throughout Canada.
To create the EP9 art car, NIO and the Petersen Museum considered many talented creatives but ultimately selected an in-demand commercial artist, Ornamental Conifer—the professional moniker of Nicolai Sclater. The British-born artist is now located in Los Angeles where he went from artist-in-residence to the position of art director at the influential car-culture-centric media agency Race Service. Sclater’s bright, bold, and often cheekily provocative work explores branding in a post-consumer society. He is inspired by the urban environment—especially graffiti—hip-hop music, the aesthetics of advertising and signage, and the emotional impact such visual messaging can create. His typography, conveying impactful messages with a Pop Art feel, has adorned everything from clothing (including jackets for the band Arctic Monkeys) to crockery to skateboards and surfboards, and he has dubbed his signature, tongue-in-cheek wordplay “Coniferisms.”
The EP9 was not Sclater’s first automotive canvas; while living and working in London, he started giving classic motorbikes his custom paint jobs, embellishing them with Coniferisms in oil-based enamel paint applied with traditional sign-painting brushes. Although Sclater is not to be pigeonholed as an automotive artist—he chooses the car as canvas only when it speaks to him—his work has also adorned a Steyr-Puch Pinzgauer, a BMW E30 M3, a Toyota GR Supra, a Volkswagen Scirocco, and several Porsches: a 1977 911 rebuilt by Hamburg-based Wicked Sixes to resemble a 1974 911 Carrera 3.0RS, a 1970 911T for a private client, and a 935 that was showcased at SEMA. He has also created racing helmets for Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo. In addition to the signwriting components, Sclater creates what may look like wraps or decals but are in fact hand-painted elements.
The prospect of painting on a vehicle as rare as the EP9 appealed to Sclater when he was approached about the project. How many other artists would ever be afforded this opportunity? And the car’s uniquely aerodynamic shape made for such a compelling canvas. Sclater’s inspiration for the car’s look was a culmination of a five-year artistic stage—a period characterized by the ideas of communication, dialogue, and engagement. The words “engage” and “exchange” are featured in bold yellow on the vehicle, reflecting the artistic phase in which it was conceived. Combining elements from classic motorsports liveries, graffiti, and traditional signwriting, the paint job was completed in about four weeks.
The newly painted vehicle made its first appearance in the second iteration of the Petersen’s Hypercars exhibition, making it the second EP9 to be featured at the Museum. It was then auctioned online by The Market at Bonham’s; the art car was the largest auction item ever offered for sale by the Petersen. And this is where the car’s buyer enters the picture. Matt Katz is a long-time supporter of the Petersen Museum and has lent numerous vehicles from his impressive Caretaker’s Collection to the Museum’s exhibitions and programs. Katz was impressed by the vehicle’s history and pedigree—the EP9 in question had tested its mettle at multiple racetracks, including Shanghai and Beijing International Circuits, and in Malaysia and England—as well as by NIO’s innovation and mission. But the car was sold without batteries and several mechanical components, and Katz wanted a car he could drive. So, with NIO’s blessing, the Petersen looped another big name into the mix—Bisi Ezerioha.
Ezerioha is at the forefront of automobile performance modification. He came to the Petersen’s attention as a customizer of Porsche vehicles when the Museum was developing its exhibition We Are Porsche. Born in the United States but raised in Nigeria, Ezerioha got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at California State University, Long Beach, and then worked for over a decade in the pharmaceutical industry before his love of motorsports and high-performance automobiles got the best of him, and he opened Bisimoto Engineering in Ontario, California, in the mid-1990s. Bisimoto got its start turning humble Hondas into high-horsepower dragsters with performance parts of his own design. Ezerioha then started modifying 911s, adding twin turbos and other modern technological improvements. Since then, he has also worked his magic on modern Boxsters and Caymans. From the start, one of his goals was to combine power and efficiency, a pursuit that eventually led him to electric power. He built the first two electric Porsche “935s” using 911 chassis and modified Tesla drivetrains, turning him into a new icon in the Porsche community.
The Petersen Museum reached out to Ezerioha to ask if he’d be interested in getting the EP9 up and running, and, inspired by the car’s rarity and after just one day spent evaluating the vehicle, Ezerioha accepted the challenge. And what a challenge it turned out to be. When Bisimoto Engineering takes on a new project, their first step is usually to take a model of the car apart to see how everything fits together. That can’t be done with an automobile this rare. The EP9 provided a slew of interesting obstacles for Ezerioha—obstacles that might frustrate and frighten the average car-tinkerer but that tantalized this cutting-edge engineer. (Even removing the car’s wheels involved manufacturing a special tool, designed with 3D-printed prototypes.) “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle meets a Rubik’s Cube,” Ezerioha says of integrating new components like the powerplant with the car’s existing onboard electronics. But it’s one of the most exciting projects he’s ever tackled. Ezerioha and his team of fabricators and engineers had put over 10,000 labor-hours into the EP9 by the end of June 2023, and the project was not yet even half completed. This is partly because Bisimoto is creating a “future-forward” vehicle—one in which, as technology improves, battery and charging systems can be upgraded, so that the car is always at the forefront of what is mechanically and technologically possible.
When Bisimoto Engineering finishes the EP9 at the end of July, Matt Katz will have a true gem of an automobile on his hands. A beautiful form, made one-of-a-kind by Ornamental Conifer’s artistic flair, fitted with two motors capable of achieving 18,500 rpm and a targeted 0-60 mph acceleration of just 1.7 seconds, regenerative braking, and a charging system capable of fully charging the battery in just 32 minutes. Attesting to the vehicle’s legendary status, the EP9 art car is featured alongside the original EP9 in FORZA Horizon 5. In August 2023, the completed vehicle will appear at The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering as part of a display of distinctive art cars. Attendees will have the chance to see this elite phenomenon of artistry and engineering up close—a vehicle that has gone from rare to rarer to rarest in a once-in-a-lifetime convergence of many unique skills. It is an occasion not to be missed.
