On paper, the Spyker C8 and Vector M12 have a lot in common. They are both the product of an eccentric visionary with patriotic motives; both were inspired by the aviation industry; and both are mid-engine, manual supercars that can melt your face off. And yet, driving the two cars, it became apparent to me that they are insanely different. The Spyker is an intricate, lightweight jewel and the Vector is a sleeker Cozy Coupe strapped to eardrum-bursting rocket. Both offer absolutely unforgettable driving experiences.
“BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ” my phone vibrated on a random weekday. I picked up to hear Autopian cofounder Beau Boeckmann telling me about a Spyker that had either been traded in or purchased by Galpin or…something. I don’t remember, but what I do remember was an idea so genius I couldn’t contain my excitement: Beau wanted to compare the Spyker to a car he had purchased recently but not yet driven: The Vector M12.
In short order, I found myself at Porsche Santa Clarita about to pilot two of the most interesting cars of all time.
First, there’s the Spyker C8 Spyder. The story of this car is a wild one; after a Dutch man named Maarten de Brujin developed a supercar during the 1990s, he partnered up with lawyer Victor Muller to turn that car into a reality, using the brand name of an old Dutch carriage and airplane company, Spyker.
The result was an elegant, Audi V8-powered supercar with a persona unlike anything I’ve ever seen or driven. It’s almost got a bit of a steampunk vibe, with everything mechanical and made of metal. Perhaps Rolex might be a better description; every touchpoint is absolutely perfect — the leather, the switches, the shifter. The C8 is absolutely magnificent.
As fascinating as Victor Muller is, especially given the financial and legal complications Spyker would ultimately find itself dealing with (it even bought Saab!), somehow he seems like a dentist when compared with Vector’s Jerry Wiegert. Originally from Detroit, Wiegert worked for American automakers for a while before moving to California, where he set out to build a red, white, and blue supercar to go up against Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini.
Wiegert completed a concept car that he showed at the LA Auto Show back in the mid-1970s, shortly thereafter establishing the company Vector Aeromotive. He cobbled together enough cash/investment to build the edgy, iconic Vector W8, whose mid-mounted 6.0-liter V8 sent a claimed 625 horsepower through a modified GM Turbo Hydramatic three-speed automatic transmission and promised a frankly unbelievably top speed of 242 mph.
The launch of the W8 was complicated and involved tennis star Andrew Agassi allegedly rushing the car through production, leading to an infamous mechanical breakdown, a full refund, and a damaged brand image. As time went on, Wiegert’s Vector Aeromotive found itself embroiled in a conflict with then-owner of Lamborghini, an Indonesia company called Megatech, who executed a hostile takeover, booting Wiegert out of the picture.
Beau’s Vector M12 was the only Vector built post-Wiegert; some say it was Megatech’s money-grab that bastardized the vision of the company’s founder, eschewing many of the design features that made a Vector a Vector, instead simply re-bodying a Lamborghini Diablo in a skin that looked very much like the prototype car Wiegert had been working on prior to his ouster.
What Are They Like To Drive?
Even getting into the two cars couldn’t be more different. The Spyker has a beautiful, delicate hidden switch head of the mirror that opens the scissor door:
The Vector also has a hidden switch/latch, but it’s mechanical, and yields a door whose opening is, frankly, barely an opening:
Once inside, the Spyker is simply a masterpiece. Reading up the history of the brand, I got the impression that the car was a bit of a pet-project of a pair of Dutchmen, one of whom is extremely eccentric and, to some, a bit “out there.” This led me to completely underestimate the car, because one look at the build quality of the C8 made it feel like the antithesis of a pet-project. This thing felt complete, and rock solid.
The red leather is simply perfect. The gauges, the switches, the aerospace-inspired vents — absolutely gorgeous, not just visually but especially to the touch. They are deeply satisfying to use.
Every single part of the car is made of the very highest quality materials built in the most precise and gorgeous way. Just look at the pedals:
Even under the front “hood” (which does not contain an engine, as the Spyker is mid-engine), the suspension and mechanicals look refined:
The Vector was completely different inside; the Spyker is refined and a bit dainty; the Vector is crude and brutal.
The sills one has to jump over to get into the seat are massive, the steering wheel looks like a regular four-spoke you’d find in maybe an Oldsmobile, and the switches are straight-up out of any 1990s-era GM:
Look at the photo above the switch picture and you’ll see on the left side that the vent is coming detached from the dash. The Vector M12’s build quality is not great, to put it lightly. And compared to the Spyker? It’s a toy. Even the Vector’s steel tubeframe looked crude compared to the Spyker’s aluminum chassis.
Up front, unlike the Spyker, the Vector has a big, usable frunk whose prop rod is not actually a rod but rather a spring that one just bends to the side to close the lid; it’s very clever. Also clever are the repurposed Mazda Miata turn signals:
The only place under the skin where the Vector actually holds its own compared to the Spyker in terms of aesthetics is out back. The Vector’s 492 horsepower 5.7-liter Lamborghini V12 looks great:
By comparison, here is the Spyker’s 400 horsepower 4.2-liter Audi V8:
Based on these first impressions, it seemed to me that “steampunk” and “elegant” might be words to best describe the Spyker, whereas the term “insane” best fits the Vector. And this translated exactly to the driving experience.
The 2,750 pound Spyker is one of the greatest cars I’ve ever driven. The combination of its unmatched build quality, its lightweight chassis, its amazing exposed-linkage shifter, and that lovely 400 horsepower 4.2-liter Audi engine yielded a truly put-together driving experience. The Spyker C8 is special; anyone who drives it will probably use that very word. It’s simply special.
“It sounds so good; this car is way too good for it being so low volume,” I say in the YouTube video. “Oh man I love this car; I really love it!”
Beau and I suspected that jumping from that Rolex-in-car-form into this rather shoddily-put-together American supercar was going to be a disappointment, but we both knew the M12 had one weapon that could save us from having to shake our heads: That engine. “This might be superman dressed in a shabby suit,” Beau said.
Whether that V12 saved the Vector’s image in our eyes can be answered with this screenshot:
Yes. Yes it did.
That V12 is truly insane. The sound is a low, angry bark that made the symphonic Audi engine in the Spyker feel downright weak. Sure, the 3,800 pound Vector didn’t have the great shift feel of the Spyker, nor did it seem as precise overall, but in the world of analog supercars, sensory inputs are everything, and the Vector M12’s exterior design is candy for the eyes and its amazing V12’s exhaust note is candy for the ears.
It was an amazing day of driving one of the best-built, precision European supercars ever and possibly the worst-built, jackhammer American/Indonesian/Italian supercar ever. Both cars are endlessly compelling, in the way they drive, in the way they look, and in their deeply fascinating stories anchored by deeply fascinating men.
Check out the YouTube video above, and expect to read more about Beau’s Vector M12 (as part of our Should I Sell It series) as well as about the next-generation Spyker debuting (this Friday as part of our Monterey Car Week coverage).
I just wish that Spyker has the propeller steering wheel. Those things are so rad.
A special thanks to the paid members. Without you, confounder Beau might be slumming around in a Vector W8
I was like a lot of kids in the late 80’s, Vector W2 and W8 posters and all. seemed like a good formula to run a SBC in a fancy body. but then the M12 became a kit car on a Diablo frame and it either really piqued interest or lost everyone. All Vectors I have ever watched or the one I saw in real life seem to have serious cooling problems and insanely weird cockpit space and layout issues. the pedals were nearly in the center while the seats were aimed from the left like most vehicles, there was a fire wall or strut that forced you push up against the seat bolsters as well. it was not much more than a Barris Show Car to me.
So, did Beau buy the Spyker?
How hacked up are these Diablo vectors.
A lot of those rebodied Aston martins Ferrari and Maserati showcars in the 70s were heavier and a mess under the skin. Even legitimate superlegra cars had random struts covered in leather or fabric.
How compromised weight or functionality vs a diablo? I remember the c&d article back in the day quoting the manufacturers weight but saying they weren’t able to verify on their scales.
Thanks.
I JUST watched (like finished 15 min ago) the episode of Top Gear where they reviewed the first C8. Talk about timing…
The Vector is an old school super car. The C8 is art on wheels.
But what about the rust? And will they Moab?
Are those…….Cavalier tail lights flipped upside down?
They sure are. Matches well with the GM switchgear I suppose
No! They’re on in the correct orientation but partly covered in their lower outer corners.
In the article where Beau bought it myself and another commenter found that they’re distinctly Cavalier sedan taillights, the coupe had a lower trunk opening and taillights split between the main body and trunk lid. (Wagons, of course, had a third style which was unchanged from 1982-94).
That is the deep dive I never knew I needed!
Andre Agassi .. come on man
The Spyker is probably an absolutely amazing car. An absolute piece of craftsmanship.
But thanks to popular media of the time, it’ll always mentally be “Pagani for 2000s era Hip Hop artists” to me.
The Vector was a piece of vaporware that ran in print for years before it was eventually built – and before vaporware was a thing. It’s not even in the same league as the Spyker.
I’ve seen a Spyker in person parked up at a valet stand in Fort Lauderdale – it’s an incredible piece of equipment.
That’s the one I’ll go with.
No mention of the split side windows in the Spyker? I found them to be quite unusual for a drophead….
“…a bit of a pet-project of a pair of Dutchmen, one of whom is extremely eccentric and, to some, a bit “out there.”
I just wanted to call out and highlight this specific phrase when describing a citizen of a country that decided to make itself bigger by pumping the ocean out.
I remember the Vector from the LA Auto Show. I thought it was sort of like the Tucker in that it probably would not ever be built.
This particular Vector is just a rebodied Lamborghini Diablo
I’d love to see this again with a “real” Vector, with its 3 speed transmission
I have no interest in driving a three-speed auto supercar. The M12 is the best Vector if you care about driving; if you want to look at it, then the W8.
Nobody has any interest in driving a three-speed auto supercar
My point is that this rebodied Lamborghini Diablo is not a real Vector.
I’d like to se a test of a real Vector
Was the Vector really in the shop for eight months for a clutch change!?! If so, what was the holdup? Parts? A “work on it between customer cars” order from Beau?
Yeah that caught my attention as well, and from the limited drive time after the change it still sounded like it was slipping a bit…
All the history says they put automatics in them, so maybe a problem with the auto that took longer than clutch replacement?
The W8 (original Vector) had a 3 speed auto, but this is the M12 which has a manual.
Noted, so Beau and David didn’t misspeak…
Maybe I need to go back in time, but the Vector styling, and aesthetics, just didn’t seem to age well. It looks old and frumpy, and not in a good way like an old Volvo.
And the closer I look at the Vector photos, the worse it gets like it’s a kit car.
What an amazing comparison test, which of course prompted some reading about the cars. Fun facts: The M12 has a Diablo V12, of course, but the gearbox sits behind the engine instead of at the front like the Lamborghini. It’s a ZF transaxle and reportedly shifts more smoothly than the original.
Also, one of the M12 was converted to a factory race car (ASR spec) but didn’t compete for long. That car was converted to a LT1 ‘vette drivetrain by Wiegert after Megatech left the picture.
Oh, gee, what were they thinking when choosing the taillamps from plain vanilla 1991–1994 Chevrolet Cavalier then flipping them upside down before installing on exorbitantly priced Vector M12…
It’s not that rare for supercar manufacturers to use head / tail / markers from more common cars. Those things are a pain to design and manufacture.
I think the Lamborghini Diablo used 300ZX headlights and I’m pretty sure Lotus used tail lights from a common UK car on the Esprit.
Early Esprits used the rear lights from a Rover SD1 (and Lotus Excels used those same lights upside down). Later Esprits used the rear lights from the extremely exotic Toyota Corolla.
When those ran out (shortly after I started working there) they replaced those with the bespoke S2 Elise round lights.
Crap, sorry, really early Esprits used Fiat X1/9 rear lights too.
Is it just to avoid designing and manufacturing them, or is there a certification process that OEMs are trying to avoid?
I somewhat remember there being a decent amount of rules around lights and reflectors in addition to making sure the materials will survive life in the elements without cracking or discoloring (at least for a period of years).
The design engineering is non-trivial, the styling design is a massive ball-ache as they guys with crayons just won’t stop tweaking things, but it’s the tooling investment that kills it for small volume manufacturers. Injection moulding tooling is tens of thousands of pounds for something small and simple, add in multi-colour injection to a single part and it gets very expensive very quickly (which is why the S1 Elise uses the same tool to make the same light in three different colours).
The famously pink rear lights on the 2006-on Europa are the direct result of the styling ambition being out of budget.
Very small volumes can use rapid prototype parts, but that’s not cheap either.
I worked with injection molding for a long time. Things changed a lot over my time with that company.
By the time I left, you could get soft tooling made in china for prototype runs for less than the first 3D printed items I had made. At one point we even 3D printed molds. They worked very briefly and only with very simple items. Definitely not well enough to make sense over just printing the prototype items directly.
I know, but Chevrolet Cavalier?!? There are many beautiful taillamps that would do better justice for Vector M2.
You’re more likely to see them on a Vector these days, so they’re Vector light now.
They’re not upside down! They’re partly covered at the edges.
Having watched the video, I am now all consumed by trying to figure out who Beau sounds like. It is such a familiar voice and I can’t dredge it out of my smooth brain for the life of me. Closest I got was Randy Pobst without the gravelly undertone but it’s not right.
*flips desk*
I only listened to the first ten seconds, but…do you know Rob Huebel?
Now if the Spyker had the R8’s V10 and gated manual…
Later ones came with a supercharged version of the Audi V8 I believe.
Forget the gated shifter, the one they’ve got there is far far better looking.
Gated shifters are cool, but the shifter in this is the first thing that comes to mind from my memories of the first time I saw pictures of the Spyker. It’s fantastic.
You are correct, in my mind I said matching manual, whilst visualising the gated manual in the R8 as my reference.
The open linkage of the Spyker is far superior.
I’m glad I watched the video. I was quite confused by Beau’s beard in the Vector drive screenshot. It seemed like unusually strong and neat growth for a few hours.
It also really adds to the review – it’s great to have a V12, but less great if every time you put your foot down it roasts the clutch. And even in the limited drive time after changing the clutch it still sounded like it was slipping…
Get ready for some steering-wheel nerdiness.
I’m positive that steering wheel wasn’t from Oldsmobile, and probably not anywhere else at GM North America. Frankly, GM would never have designed a steering wheel that clean-looking during that era.
After poring over photos of contemporary volume cars, it looks like the Vector M12’s wheel is from the Ford Contour/Mystique, but with the side buttons removed. The Contour was designed primarily by Ford Europe where it was sold as the Mk.1 Mondeo, but the Mondeo uses an entirely different airbag steering wheel, so it appears this variant was just for North America, perhaps for compliance reasons. Yet it wasn’t the same as the mid-late-90s 4-spoke wheel that FoMoCo used on its other North American vehicles (MN12 Thunderbird and Cougar, Mark VIII, gen. 3 Taurus, gen. 2 Explorer/Mountaineer, SN95 Mustang, etc)
The final (1999-2002) Mercury Cougar also used this weird steering wheel variant, and this time the overseas Ford Cougar did as well.
Here’s where it gets more interesting.
From September 1, 1995 to August 31, 1996, NHTSA decided that cars sold in the US were were federally mandated to have some sort of automatic restraint system. That restraint system could be a driver airbag, but it could also be an automatic seatbelt. It is worth noting that by this time, the overwhelming majority of cars sold here had transitioned to at least a driver’s airbag. Beginning in September 1, 1996, at least 95% of every automaker’s US-market units had to have a dual front airbags, and by September 1, 1997, all the units had to have dual airbags.
In or around June 1995, Vector applied for an NHTSA exemption for any restraints on the M12 until May 1, 1997. This would mean that until that time, Vector could manufacture the M12 without any airbags and with just regular three-point seatbelts. In September 1995, NHTSA acknowledged the turmoil that the company faced and granted the exemption…but shrank the time period to 12 months. This would mean that after September 1, 1996, all of Vector’s production would need to meet the dual front airbag requirement, same as any other automaker.
You don’t say what year this Vector is, but I assume it was produced after September 1, 1996. There’s a crude airbag readiness light that you can see plastered on top of the instrument cluster, likely because Vector didn’t have the money to redesign the actual cluster to accommodate it. Weirder still…Vector did not put a label on either of the airbag covers (driver or passenger) indicating them as such. It doesn’t look like NHTSA required this, but every other automaker did it back then… including boutique automakers with early airbags, like Morgan.
I also think it’s quite interesting that this is completely loaded with GM interior parts except the steering wheel and HVAC controls. When you’re already putting together an interior with a combination of S10 Blazer and Firebird switchgear and gauges and throwing Cavalier taillights on it why have a random Ford parts like the steering wheel and the climate control thrown in?
I’d think it would be easier to just source everything from one place, especially if you can build the dashboard however you want anyway. That’s what de Tomaso (SN-95 Mustang) and Shelby (Camaro and Oldsmobile parts) did around the same time. On the other hand Lotus did the Elise and Esprit in the 1990s with random collections of late 80s Vauxhall, Peugeot and Alfa Romeo parts mixed together; so what do I know.
That would make sense for a scaled effort at building the car, but only 14 production cars were completed before Lamborghini stopped sending engines for nonpayment. It was likely a case of the company intending to improve the aesthetics *after* some success on the sales front. Vector simply didn’t have any money and likely sourced these bits extremely cheaply. In fact, they were probably just whatever Wiegert had lying around at the time.
That’s certainly possible. The M12 that sold on BaT a few years ago that I looked at pictures of to see what the HVAC panel was actually has a different dash layout, with a 1.5 DIN head unit cleanly flush mounted in the bottom section of the dash and the HVAC fit perfectly into the top bay (as opposed to a single DIN jammed into the top and protruding out and the HVAC fitted to the bottom with a big filler panel for the rest of the space).
I can’t imagine any of the owners who owned the car since it left the factory did that hack job themselves, so Vector running out of original radios and just running to Crutchfield and grabbing something off the shelf would explain it.
When you’re already skating by with an exemption for active front restraints and your boutique car needs to have dual airbags within a year, you don’t necessarily get to be choosy. It’s quite possible that Vector or whichever third party it worked with determined that the FoMoCo airbags were the easiest or cheapest starting point—probably due to geometry and interior volume—and that was that. They’d have still needed to develop their own deployment logic and certify that their car met FMVSS 208 for crashworthiness, which is no small feat.
Just so you know, I appreciate you.
Paging Mark: We have a SuperShitbox Showdown on our hands here.
The Spyker is precision and elegance. The Vector is testosterone and crassness. In fact, there is so much testosterone in the Vector that Beau grew a beard within seconds of taking the wheel.
I love every detail of the Spyker. Styling is a little odd, but the build overall is just amazing. They care about every detail.
I couldn’t say no to a purple Vector but I very much prefer the original, sharper angled Vector body to the bulbous, final form. Great write up.
While I agree with you on the styling, of the two, I’d have to go with the one that doesn’t have a three-speed automatic.
So true. A gorgeous car built for great car posters.
I remember reading about the launch of the original Vector and facepalming when I got to the gearbox.
Terrible decision for a car trying to compete with European supercars.
I still had a picture of one on my wall though, because it looks insane.