Drako Co-Founder Shiv Sikand Explains Why He Started His Own Supercar Company

Plus, his philosophy on how EV sports cars should drive based on his love of E46 M3s.

A decade ago, business partners Shiv Sikand and Dean Drako decided to start an electric car company in a garage in San Jose, California, with all the free time they had between running their successful software company and collecting classic cars. After working under the radar for nearly 10 years, the Drako GTE was revealed to the world at the 2019 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.

Who were these guys who came out of nowhere with an electric supercar based on a Fisker Karma they wanted $1.25 million for? Was this company the real deal, or just some tinkerers looking for venture capital cash? Earlier this year, we finally got the chance to ride in the car, and we came away impressed. We also got time with Sikand, the executive vice president and co-founder, and he explained why he and Drako decided to build cars, how their philosophy differs from other electric vehicle manufacturers, and how he thinks a high-performance EV ought to drive.

MotorTrend: What are you trying to accomplish with your electric car company? Elon Musk is an engineer who wants to make the world a better place, and Yueting Jia just wanted to make the automobile part of his giant media ecosystem. You really sound like you just want to make a car.

Shiv Sikand: Yeah, we do. We'll do it. We're crazy. You know, I was down in Newport Beach. I met one of the main guys out there who've been around in the industry for a long time. He says, 'Why are you getting into the car business?' Looking at me stupidly, like 'is there something wrong with you?' I'm like, 'yeah, there's something wrong with us. You know, Dean [Drako] and I are kind of crazy.'

I'll tell you what happened, what happened was that I reached a point, both of us did. We bought everything, right? You know, to me everything is a Ferrari. Trust me, OK? I know you've got Porsche guys and you got Ferrari guys, but we've tried everything, and we love Ferraris, both of us. Right? We have a 288 GTO, amongst others, and that was the quintessential car. And then we realized that what we really wanted wasn't available.

I didn't really want to buy a lot of the other cars. The environmental...horrible. I don't like hybrids. Right. … I've got two E46 M3s and I hope I get another one soon in a different color, and we wanted to build a car because we couldn't find the car that we wanted.

And I love electric torque. I just love it. The ability to control that torque and to create this new kind of driving experience and make a beautiful car, that's the motivation and we're having a good time doing it and we're meeting incredible people and having incredible experiences.

MT: Has that changed at all in the 10 years you've been developing this car? Is someone making the car that you thought you wanted 10 years ago now?

SS: I'm still looking. I think, I think it's here. I believe this is it, but you know, it's not like any of the other cars are shipping. I think that I saw Mate's Concept One. I thought it was super cool. I'm sure that he's working very hard on his stuff, but this is the beginning. This market is wide open. I think there's 20-25 different companies to innovate in both [electric] sports cars, in GT cars, and in mobility. I like Mate's style, that he's going for the all-out two-seater supercar. He doesn't even have a floor battery. He has this T configuration. Not a huge fan of that, personally, because one of the advantages is symmetry of the platform. However, we've seen lots of manufacturers—our good friends at Porsche—put the engine in the wrong place and still make a fantastic car.

Let's be serious. The engineers can do amazing things, but that's a two-seat sports car. I'm very excited to see what that brings. Very excited. And I think that our niche is GT cars because I've always loved GT cars my whole life. I'm always looking for the next GT car. I find it elegant, stylish, and mostly understated, and you can drive them anywhere. I like the journey. It's like, I remember when I discovered the Michelin Guide, right. One star was it was on your way. Two stars, it was worth the diversion. Three stars, it was a planned trip. That's how I feel because motoring, to me, is still very romantic. I still think it's the greatest invention of our lives.

I mean, jets are good; I get to see my mom and jet around the place, but from something that you spend so much of your life doing, your bed and your car are high up on that list and the pleasure of driving—we're rally men at the end of the day. We did Peking to Paris, 36 days in a 69' [Peugeot] 504. Kicked our asses every night. We just like to drive. Maybe there's something wrong with us. You asked me the same way. I don't know there's something wrong with us. I have no other explanation for it. We just love to drive, and this is the new driving.

MT: I'm getting the sense that these certain cars, the E46's and the Ferrari's, inform your philosophy of how this car drives. In particular, it's something we notice in the electric cars all the time: You go hard on the accelerator, and oftentimes it's a shock to the system.

SS: Giddy up. Giddy Up, I call it. Unsettles the car. Great in a straight line. You try doing that in the canyon. She's like, 'Whoa.' She's bouncing on her nose or standing up on her rear end. No, this is next level. We're able to do that because we're catering to different market. Different style of battery, different style of propulsion. And, you know, just juice it and go juice it and go, just eat electrons, spit them out. It's, it's a different style. I love it.

MT: It seems much more holistic to me. As an example, the Model S party trick is you can just flat it and people go, 'Oh my God, I've never gone this fast before.' But that's sort of the one thing it does. Your approach seems to be a lot further beyond that. More focused on how the car behaves in all directions, not just in one direction.

SS: There's nothing to do with Tesla, all right? What it has to do with Tesla is we're standing on the shoulders of giants. They're a $700 billion company. We're moving 25 units. Our battery technology, that knowledge, is directly inherited from the massive investments that Tesla has made not just in technology, but in people. And specifically, allowing open patents and encouraging the small guy. Elon's always said he's going to encourage us.

Their equation, though, was longevity. Elon has talked about a million miles. I'm not. I'm talking about just going as fast as possible as the current technology will allow, and let the chips fall where they may. It's a different philosophy where we're just racers at heart, but we want to build fast electrics cars that are just delicious to drive. We're not doing it for any other reason. We're not doing it to dominate the world. We're doing it to break even. Let's not even talk about a Tesla because it drives itself. Please. Let's look at the future of that car. It's built to be the next generation of robo-taxi. We are the next-generation performance car. They're fully complementary, right?

MT: I'm getting the sense that these certain cars, the E46's and the Ferrari's, inform your philosophy of how this car drives. In particular, it's something we notice in the electric cars all the time: You go hard on the accelerator, and oftentimes it's a shock to the system.

SS: Giddy up. Giddy Up, I call it. Unsettles the car. Great in a straight line. You try doing that in the canyon. She's like, 'Whoa.' She's bouncing on her nose or standing up on her rear end. No, this is next level. We're able to do that because we're catering to different market. Different style of battery, different style of propulsion. And, you know, just juice it and go juice it and go, just eat electrons, spit them out. It's, it's a different style. I love it.

MT: It seems much more holistic to me. As an example, the Model S party trick is you can just flat it and people go, 'Oh my God, I've never gone this fast before.' But that's sort of the one thing it does. Your approach seems to be a lot further beyond that. More focused on how the car behaves in all directions, not just in one direction.

SS: There's nothing to do with Tesla, all right? What it has to do with Tesla is we're standing on the shoulders of giants. They're a $700 billion company. We're moving 25 units. Our battery technology, that knowledge, is directly inherited from the massive investments that Tesla has made not just in technology, but in people. And specifically, allowing open patents and encouraging the small guy. Elon's always said he's going to encourage us.

Their equation, though, was longevity. Elon has talked about a million miles. I'm not. I'm talking about just going as fast as possible as the current technology will allow, and let the chips fall where they may. It's a different philosophy where we're just racers at heart, but we want to build fast electrics cars that are just delicious to drive. We're not doing it for any other reason. We're not doing it to dominate the world. We're doing it to break even. Let's not even talk about a Tesla because it drives itself. Please. Let's look at the future of that car. It's built to be the next generation of robo-taxi. We are the next-generation performance car. They're fully complementary, right?

MT: I imagine it's a tight rope to walk being between being proactive and doing too much. Because another big criticism, whether it's Ferrari's Manettino or anything else is that, some purists argue, the computers are doing too much of the driving, and that you're not driving the car. You're telling the software what to do, and the software is making you seem like a better driver than you actually are.

SS: Which is not a bad thing given the escalation in horsepower, right? In fact, Valentino and I were discussing this. He said, 'Shiv, no, don't say bad things about that system because these cars are coming down at incredible speeds.' A GT3 RS is coming down here at beyond race car speeds, and they don't have six-point belts. They don't have a proper seat. They're a streetcar, and they're as fast as the race car on the back straight. Okay, so that's a good point. Now, the horsepower war has ruined the car because they just got too much power. It became bragging rights. Why? Because they didn't have a compelling differentiator, so it became the horsepower war. So I think the whole car industry is a mess, and from that, something new will come, and this is my attempt. I hope you like it.

MT: How do you give the driver this assistance, this kind of variability of being able to control the wheels individually, and keep that driving experience where you don't feel like the computer is doing the driving for you and you're just sort of turning the wheel?

SS: I tell you what it is. What is the sensation of driving? What is it, driving, really? From a GT perspective, driving—not showing off on a track or trying to set a lap time. The secret to me: It's the wheel, right? Your relationship. It's your two hands on the wheel, and the relationship between your butt, your feet, and your hands. You watch the greats, watch their hands. Watch Kalle Rovanperä in-car. He's 17 years old. That can never come to mere mortals.

So for us, it's putting that man, that driver, in your car through digital control. It's not traction control. It's completely different. It's got nothing to do with traction control, right? It's got to do with traction per se because remember in these modern traction control systems, they can't really apportion torque and they can't really slow the wheel down without using the hydraulic brake. There's no deceleration mechanism, and there's a distribution mechanism, right? So, what they have to do has no relevance to what we're doing. None!

I'm not saying that that ends our argument. It frames our argument, right? That this is a different way. It's, as Pilgrim would tell you, 'it's got four wheels, mate.' Yeah, four wheels and a steering wheel. Let's get on with it. We do have four wheels and a steering wheel and different way of controlling it and honestly, it's a different form.

The thing about the computer apportioning the torque—that computation helps you rotate. Ask Andy what he thinks about it because as he says you can get onto the throttle earlier. He gets into the throttle early, so he gets on the throttle while turning. That's what you felt in the car. That's what Valentino, he's on the throttle while turning. Who doesn't want the front of the car to bite? All of these big long cars? Name me any of them—we'll go Panamera, Audi, anything. They all understeer like pigs. Come on. They all run wide. Even the Taycan's running wide. It doesn't go around because you want it to be safe because then they worry that that understeer can make it neutral. We don't have those issues.

This car, on ice, 90 degrees sideways and she'll flick back. You can just hold or anything. What's the beauty of the car? She'll do what you tell her to do in the steering wheel. To me, that's a good car. Everything else, how you get there? As long as it does it with a good sensation, it doesn't matter. Does she do what I want her to do? To me, that's the definition of a car.

MT: I wonder, then, how you arrived at the four controls—the Quattro Manettinos—and the reason I ask is you seem like you have a very clear philosophy of how you want the car to behave and how you want it to be set up. But you also have a bunch of controls to let people change it.

SS: Remember that this is about balance. Let's look at one of the Manettinos, right? Because two of them are really mode selectors, and you're not messing with them because the mode is not varying minute to minute.

So, that's the surface. You know what surface you're on; you're telling the algorithm what your grip level is so they can optimize for that grip level. Optimizing on ice is very different than optimizing on [racing] slicks. OK, so that's set. The other one also is set. Which is normally it's in TV plus SC (Torque Vectoring and Stability Control), which is like our magic "on."

The other settings are there just for fun and for experiencing different things (Torque Vectoring only, Stability Control only, Drift, and Off). So the two remaining Manettinos are the front-rear power split and the regen. Let's talk about the front power. When you're blasting down straight or whatever it is, you want all four motors on, boom. You're on a tight canyon road, up on Angeles Crest, you don't want too much power in the front, and you just you want to drift around a little bit, just back it off. It doesn't cause a car to push; you don't want to overpower anything.

It's just balance again. For me, it's balance, and we have such a symmetrical platform that it just gives you that bias control, right? It's the same thing with the regen. I love coasting. You can't coast in a Tesla. In a Taycan, you don't automatically get lift-off regen unless you find it in a menu, and you can't control the level.

Here, you can set the balance of the car. Often, when I'm out, cruising on the canyons, I'll only have brake regen. I love to coast. You know, coming down a hill about 99 or 100 mph with no throttle. You can't do that in a regular car because when you want to press the thing again, you're not in gear and you're going to blow your transmission or worse, crash. But you can do that in our car.

And if you want regen, you want one-pedal driving, click it on. You want to switch off regen entirely, you can. You can go to just conventional brake. You can't do that on any other car. Why? Because they got blended braking; they don't have this notion of hydraulic only. Regen helps you keep the brakes cool, particularly on the track. We run varying levels of track, but sometimes even I had to say, 'ah, a little bit less.' There's V12 regen, V8 regen, coast. The flexibility, balance, enjoyment.

MT: I do have to ask, of all the platforms you could have started with, how did you land on a Fisker Karma?

SS: Proportions. You know, proportions matter. Let's be honest, it's a good-looking car. I mean, Henrik [Fisker] did a great job of what I call the greenhouse, and then [Drako chief designer] Lowie Vermeersch took it to the next level. We took the powertrain to the next level. We took the engineering to the next level. Lowie took the design to the next level. It just had the right proportions, and we felt that it was the right platform to build on.