Yangwang U9 Xtreme Hits 312.65 MPH to Become the World’s Fastest Production Car

There’s a new fastest car in town, fom a brand you might never have heard of. Forget Bugatti, Koenigsegg, Hennessey, or even SSC—the title of the World’s Fastest Production Car now belongs to Yangwang, a brand owned by BYD.

Last week, driven by German race driver Marc Basseng, its U9 Xtreme ripped along a 10-km (6.2-mile) stretch of Abu Dhabi freeway and hit a peak speed of 312.65 mph. Which in metric numbers means it’s the first car ever to break the 500-kph barrier at 503.17 kph. Naturally, it’s an EV.

It’s the most powerful production EV the world has ever seen. While Tesla’s Model S Plaid made do with 1,020 hp and a Lucid Air Sapphire has 1,234 hp, the quad-motor Yangwang develops 2,978 hp. The plan is for 30 cars to be built in this Xtreme spec, which features a world-first 1200-volt electrical architecture, each priced at around $3 million.

The culmination of a three-year project that saw the U9X already steal the Bugatti Chiron SuperSport’s crown when it hit 308.33 mph—that’s 496.21 kph—at the ATP Papenburg test track in Germany last year, there’s clearly some very advanced engineering at work on everything from the aerodynamics to the Giti tires. The uprated motors spin at up to 30,000 rpm, each offering torque-vectoring control that adjusts up to 100 times per second.

It’s undoubtedly a remarkable achievement, but it does raise a few questions. Although ratified by the FIA (the governing body of world motorsport) as well as Guinness World Records, this is a peak speed achieved in one direction. The genuine two-way record is still the 282.9 mph achieved by the SSC Tuatara at the Kennedy Space Center back in January 2021. That record was a rerun after controversy surrounding its first attempt in Nevada, where the GPS measurements were found to be inaccurate.

But this has been a trend more broadly. Bugatti claimed it could only run the Chiron record in one direction as there were concerns about the tarmac if running the other way at VW’s Ehra-Lessien facility. If you have to find a particular stretch of tarmac at least 10 km (6.2 miles) long, perfectly smooth and flat, with ideal weather conditions, how does that align with the idea of it being a production car?

These records are now so extreme and specialized that they are losing relevance. When records breaking 200 mph (the Ferrari F40 in 1987) or even 250 mph (the first Bugatti Veyron in 2005), these were speeds we could relate to. But Montana and Nevada have long since given up on their ‘reasonable and prudent’ speed limits, and there’s constant pressure to eliminate the limit-free stretches of German autobahns.

But high-speed road cars have never really been about offering owners the opportunity of doing it themselves. They’ve been engineering and technology demonstrators, publicity stunts designed to promote their products in the surest way possible: Sell people a big number. Here’s a big number. And now you’ve heard of Yangwang. Mission accomplished. —Ollie Marriage