If you’re flying over Texas somewhere just west of Houston, the giant H-shaped building you see isn’t some new Hyundai plant. The stylized H stands for Hennessey, and it’s the new home to Hennessey Performance and Hennessey Special Vehicles. It’s where the different branches of the performance car company will be able to double its annual production.
Hennessey is spending $15 million to build the new facility, where it will build cars like its own Venom F5 as well as its high-performance versions of vehicles like the Ford F-150 and Ram 1500. With the new factory, Hennessey will have more than 100,000 square feet of space to build its vehicles. That, the company says, will allow it to double production and build around 2,000 vehicles per year.
The new shop will let Hennessey bring painting operations in house. It will also be able to bring its composite manufacturing in-house, letting it build carbon fiber panels for the Venom F5 as well as its modified vehicles like the Venom 800 and VelociRaptor 1000.
It will also let Hennessey expand its Tuner School. The trade school, which teaches students how to modify vehicles and not just repair them, will get a dedicated 10,000 square foot building as part of the expansion.
Hennessey has already started construction work on the new building. It will be located on the tuner’s 143-acre campus just off Interstate 10 in Sealy. It’s expected to be ready for production next spring. Hennessey says that it should add up to 80 new jobs by the end of next year.
John Hennessey started building performance cars in 1991, when he was using some of those cars to race at places like Pikes Peak and Bonneville. The company has developed its reputation over the decades since, with cars like the Viper-based Hennessey Venom 650R of 1996 and the 1,000 horsepower Hennessey Exorcist Camaro of 2017 helping to cement it.
“It doesn’t seem long ago that I was racing up Pike’s Peak and setting a speed record at Bonneville in the infancy of starting the business. I’ve been extremely blessed to turn my dream of racing and creating fast, fun vehicles from a hobby into a business with over 125 employees and more than 18,000 customers around the world.”
– John Hennessey.
HPE delivered 560 trucks, SUVs, and cars in 2024, and it expects to deliver more than 900 in 2025. A projected run of more than 1,300 vehicles in 2026 is helping to drive the expansion, which should help Hennessey meet demand for its vehicles.
Hennessey’s performance and cosmetic upgrades are available for popular domestic cars, trucks, and SUVs including Ford, Ram, and Chevrolet pickups, GM’s full-sized SUV trio, and the Ford Mustang and Cadillac CT5. The Venom F5 series is targeting a top speed of 300 miles per hour, making the US-built supercar a serious competitor to the likes of Koenigsegg.
The hottest of the F5s built so far might be the manual transmission car. Hennessey built just one, featuring a 6.6-liter twin-turbo V8 making 2,031 horsepower for brutal acceleration at nearly any speed.
Source: Hennessey Performance
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