A Dutch maker of hand-built aluminium sports cars, based in Lijnden near Amsterdam. The name comes from a coachbuilder founded in 1880 that stopped trading in 1926; Victor Muller and Maarten de Bruijn revived it in 1999 and built the mid-engined C8. The company owned Saab from 2010 to 2011, ran a Formula 1 team in 2007, and went through bankruptcies in 2014 and 2021. It returned in August 2026 with the 25-car C8 Preliator XXV.
The Spyker C8 Preliator XXV is a mid-engined coupe limited to 25 cars, shown in August 2026 and priced at about 1.5 million euros. It uses an Audi-derived 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 rated at 800 PS (789 hp) and 1,000 Nm, a six-speed manual gearbox with the linkage left exposed, and an aluminium spaceframe under hand-formed aluminium panels. Spyker quotes 2.7 seconds to 100 km/h and around 2,100 hours of assembly per car.
Spyker takes its name and its emblem from the Spijker brothers, Jacobus and Hendrik-Jan, who built carriages in Amsterdam from 1880 and cars from 1898. Their 1903 60 HP was the first car with a six-cylinder engine and the first with permanent four-wheel drive. The firm built aircraft and aero engines during the First World War, which is where the propeller in the badge and the motto Nulla tenaci invia est via, “for the tenacious, no road is impassable”, come from. It stopped trading in 1926.
Victor Muller and Maarten de Bruijn revived the name in 1999 as a new company, and the mid-engined C8 followed in 2000: an aluminium spaceframe, hand-formed aluminium panels, an exposed gearshift linkage and aviation details worked through the cabin. Those became the brand’s fixed signatures rather than styling of a particular decade. The company listed on Euronext Amsterdam in 2004, bought the Midland Formula 1 team in 2006 and raced as Spyker F1 in 2007 before selling it on, and bought Saab Automobile from General Motors in 2010. Saab went bankrupt in December 2011.
The car business itself was declared bankrupt in December 2014, restructured within months, and declared bankrupt again in January 2021. Muller regained the brand and its intellectual property in October 2025 through a settlement with the trustee. In June 2026 Volodymyr Nosov, founder of the fintech group W Group and the crypto exchange WhiteBIT, became co-owner with an undisclosed stake, and the company showed the C8 Preliator XXV at Monterey Car Week that August. Spyker is based in Lijnden, near Amsterdam.
