W Motors Lykan Hypersport: The Diamond-Encrusted Debut
In 2012, a new automotive company was founded in Beirut, Lebanon, with a wildly ambitious goal: to create the Arab world’s first hypercar. The company, W Motors — later relocating its operations to Dubai, UAE — wanted to build a vehicle that reflected the extreme wealth, luxury, and futuristic vision of the Middle East, while simultaneously demonstrating that the region could produce world-class automotive engineering rather than merely consuming it.
The automotive world had never seen a hypercar manufacturer emerge from the Arab world before. The region was famous for collecting the world’s most exclusive cars, not building them. W Motors intended to change that paradigm.
At the 2013 Qatar Motor Show, they unveiled their creation: the Lykan Hypersport.
Priced at an astonishing $3.4 million, it was, at the time of its release, among the most expensive production cars ever offered for sale — behind only the Lamborghini Veneno in the production car hierarchy. The Lykan did not justify its price tag solely through lap times or top speed records. It justified it through sheer, unapologetic opulence, featuring materials previously unheard of in automotive construction and a level of bespoke luxury that targeted the absolute upper tier of the global high-net-worth market.
W Motors: The Founding Vision
Ralph R. Debbas, a Lebanese entrepreneur with a background in luxury consumer products and technology, founded W Motors with a specific philosophy: that the hypercar should not be defined exclusively by European aesthetic tradition, but could be reimagined through the lens of Arab luxury, culture, and visual language.
The “W” in W Motors stands for Wolf — an animal that represents strength, intelligence, and the pack leadership that Debbas wanted the brand to embody. The company assembled a team of international designers and engineers, with Italian design director Anthony Jannarelly responsible for the car’s visual identity.
The choice to launch in Qatar — at the Qatar Motor Show rather than Geneva or Frankfurt — was deliberate. Debbas wanted to introduce the car in its home market first, establishing the brand’s regional identity before seeking international recognition.
The Design: Aggression and Diamonds
The exterior design of the Lykan Hypersport, penned by Anthony Jannarelly, is hyper-aggressive in a way that reflects both European hypercar convention and specific Arab cultural references. The car’s angular body features sharp, intersecting lines said to be inspired by the Arabic numeral for seven — considered a number of special significance in Islamic tradition.
The body is crafted entirely from carbon fiber. The doors are “reverse dihedral” units that hinge from the rear pillars and swing upward and backward rather than forward — a dramatic gesture that creates significant visual theater during entry and exit. The low, wide stance and aggressive hood vents communicate purpose and performance at every angle.
However, the most famous and genuinely unprecedented feature of the exterior is contained within the headlights. To justify the astronomical price tag and establish the car’s luxury credentials unambiguously, W Motors embedded the titanium LED headlight units with 420 diamonds totaling 15 carats. These were not decorative applications of diamonds to the bodywork or interior; the precious stones were integrated directly into the headlight assemblies, illuminated from within.
For buyers who preferred different stones, W Motors offered alternatives. Rubies, sapphires, or emeralds could be integrated into the headlight assemblies based on the individual customer’s color preference and personal symbolism. This degree of precious stone customization in a functional automotive component had no precedent in production car manufacturing.
The taillights were equally dramatic, featuring layered, blade-like LED elements extending significantly beyond the rear bodywork — theatrical in a way that complemented the overall visual excess of the car.
The Powertrain: RUF Engineering
W Motors was founded as a design and luxury positioning company rather than an engineering organization. Designing a proprietary hypercar engine and drivetrain from scratch was neither practical nor necessary — what mattered was ensuring the mechanical foundation was credible.
For this, they partnered with RUF Automobile of Pfaffenhausen, Germany — the same independent manufacturer whose CTR Yellowbird had held the production car top speed record from 1987 to 1993, and whose engineering reputation in Porsche-based performance was unimpeachable.
RUF supplied a heavily developed 3.7-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six engine based on Porsche architecture, modified to RUF’s own specifications and tuned for the Lykan Hypersport’s application. Mounted mid-ship behind the driver, this engine produced 780 horsepower and 960 Nm (708 lb-ft) of torque — figures that placed it among the most powerful naturally-aspirated-equivalent production engines of its displacement.
Power was routed to the rear wheels via a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission developed using Porsche and RUF components. The DCT provided the rapid-fire shift capability expected of a hypercar at this price point, with shift times far below what any clutch-equipped manual transmission could achieve.
Because the carbon fiber body and aluminum spaceframe kept the Lykan’s curb weight at a relatively manageable 1,380 kg (3,042 lbs), the performance delivered by the 780-horsepower powertrain was brutal. W Motors claimed 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 2.8 seconds and a theoretical top speed of 395 km/h (245 mph).
The Interior: Holograms and Gold Thread
The extreme luxury philosophy established by the diamond headlights extended throughout the cabin, where W Motors pushed the boundaries of what automotive interior designers had previously attempted.
The leather throughout the interior was selected from among the world’s finest hides, stitched using gold thread rather than conventional nylon or polyester thread. This distinction would be invisible to casual observers but deeply meaningful to owners who understood the level of craft involved. Gold thread stitching had precedent in the most expensive bespoke tailoring and luggage, but its application to automotive upholstery was entirely novel.
The most technologically ambitious element of the interior was the infotainment system. Rather than a conventional touchscreen interface, W Motors developed an interactive holographic display with gesture control technology. The system projected a three-dimensional interface into the air above the center console, allowing the driver to interact with navigation, audio, and climate control functions by moving their hands through the projected hologram. In 2013, this technology was genuinely experimental — the gesture recognition software required to make it functional in an automotive environment was a significant development challenge.
Beyond the car itself, purchasing a Lykan Hypersport came with additional luxury commitments from W Motors: a dedicated 24-hour global concierge service and a bespoke Cyrus Klepcys timepiece valued at over $200,000, included as standard with each vehicle. The timepiece alone represented a significant portion of a luxury automobile’s price.
The Furious 7 Jump: Global Recognition
Despite the Lykan’s extraordinary specifications and price, the car remained relatively obscure to mainstream global audiences following its Qatar reveal. The hypercar world knew it; the wider public did not.
This changed decisively in 2015, when the Lykan Hypersport was featured as the hero vehicle in Furious 7 — the seventh installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, which regularly attracted global audiences in the hundreds of millions.
In the sequence that defined the car’s popular culture identity, Vin Diesel’s character drives a Lykan out of the window of a skyscraper in Abu Dhabi, launching it through the air to crash through the glass face of an adjacent tower, then driving it through that building before jumping it from the other side into a third skyscraper.
The sequence is physically impossible — the actual distance between Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Towers and the lack of a ramp would make such a trajectory impossible in reality. But as a piece of cinema spectacle, it was extraordinarily effective, and the Lykan’s visual design translated perfectly to the giant screen.
To film the sequence without destroying the actual $3.4 million car, W Motors built ten cheaper fiberglass replica stunt cars using Porsche Boxster chassis as the mechanical base. Nine of the ten were completely destroyed during filming of the sequence’s various components. The single surviving stunt replica was later sold at auction.
Rarity and the Fenyr Successor
W Motors planned a strict production limit of just seven units of the Lykan Hypersport for customers globally — a number chosen partly for the cultural significance of seven in the Arab world and partly as an explicit statement of extreme exclusivity.
The seven customer cars were sold before the car’s public debut, to buyers whose identities were not disclosed publicly. The Abu Dhabi police force acquired an example for their fleet — a publicity coup that provided images of the Lykan in official service that circulated globally.
The Lykan successfully served its strategic purpose: it established W Motors as a credible presence in the hypercar market and generated the brand recognition necessary to develop subsequent products. The Fenyr SuperSport, introduced in 2016, was designed as a more accessible follow-up with a slightly lower price point and higher planned production volumes.
Whether W Motors ultimately becomes a sustained hypercar manufacturer or the Lykan remains its defining achievement, the car’s legacy is assured. It was the first hypercar from the Arab world, it was one of the most expensive production cars ever offered for sale, its diamond headlights were unprecedented in automotive history, and it flew through the windows of skyscrapers on cinema screens watched by half a billion people. As statements of intent go, the Lykan Hypersport is one of the most dramatic in automotive history.