There’s a new fastest car in town, and it’s the same as the old fastest car in town. The Yangwang U9 Xtreme has lived up to its name, managing to get clocked at more than 310 miles per hour. The car beat its own record, which was set in Germany last year.
This time it wasn’t an airport runway or a high-speed test track, though. The run was made on a public highway in Abu Dhabi.
More Extreme Than The 1999 X Games
Yangwang U9 Xtreme top speed runYangwang
On November 1, German race car driver Marc Basseng piloted the U9 Xtreme to a massive 312.65 miles per hour. That’s solidly above the 308.22 mph he hit with the car last year, and the 503.17 km/h measured speed makes it the first production car to break the 500 km/h mark.
It wasn’t easy. Yangwang first had to get six miles of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed International Road (E11) shut down. The team couldn’t use that full length, either, with about a third of the eight-lane highway reserved for stopping.
Because the road was a road, and because it runs through the desert, it had to be swept before each high-speed run over the two days. Then every inch of the road had to be inspected to make sure that there wasn’t any remaining debris, like wires from the brushes used to sweep it.
Basseng got the car to 304 mph during runs on October 31. Overnight, the team adjusted the wing and the suspension software to handle some of the nearly invisible undulations in the pavement. On November 1, he had two runs. The first proved the changes worked, and the second set the new top speed.
Is This Really A Record?
There is one caveat to go with this record, and it’s a big one. The car set Guinness World Records for Highest Speed achieved by a Production Car and Highest Speed achieved by an Electric Production Car, but both were marked “in a single-direction run.”
Traditionally, top speed records have required two-way runs. The car has to go in both directions, usually within a short period of time, to rule out tailwinds and any slope on the track. The two speeds are then averaged. The U9 Xtreme did not make any runs in the return direction, though it’s not alone in that in recent years.
The U9 Xtreme is an electric beast of a supercar. The standard U9 makes 1,269 horsepower, but the company puts enhanced motors in the Xtreme that make 744 hp… each. There are four of them, giving the car 2,978 hp all total. It still uses BYD Blade Battery tech, running a 1,200-volt electrical architecture instead of the 800-volt that is more common.
While the company calls it a production car, Yangwang plans to build just 30 units of the Xtreme.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
Yangwang U9 Xtreme top speed runYangwang
The top speed is impressive, though with a one-way run and no published win speed data, it’s not as relevant as records from just a few years ago. But that shows the problem with top-speed runs in modern cars. They’re so fast that it’s more about finding a safe place to go flat out for long enough than it is the capability of the car.
Will Bugatti, Koenigsegg, Hennessey, or one of the others vying for this record take another shot? They would if they got that same stretch of highway.
