It employs hub-motors, whereby each wheel is effectively a motor, and so it would not be practical to "buddy up" pairs of motors.
Which begs the question: why go with 8 wheels instead of 4?
Which begs another question? How did they come to the conclusion that an 8-wheeled monster doing 400km/hr would make an impact on a gasoline car-dependent world?
Something like Ford's Th!nk might have made an impact, if they'd allowed it to. Of course, the fact that it may have made an impact could very well be the reason Ford killed it off.