At this stage in the game, anyone who still has doubts about China’s amazing electric car game has either never driven one or has their head wilfully in the sand. They’re affordable, fun, efficient, and they’ve now conquered an arena historically dominated by exotic European cars: raw speed.
The fastest production car in the world is now BYD’s Yangwang U9 Xtreme hypercar, hitting 308.34 mph (496.22 km/h) on the high-speed oval at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg.
It knocks the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ off its mantle, a car that went 304.77 mph around VW’s Ehra-Lessien in 2019. The U9 Xtreme made headlines just a few weeks ago for breaking the production EV speed record with a 293.54-mph run, but it’s now taken the overall title as well.
It does all this with four electric motors that combine to make a categorically batshit 2,978 horsepower (the regular U9 makes do with just 1,288 hp). According to Top Gear, each motor can spin up to 30,000 rpm and uses the world’s thinnest super-silicon steel, measuring just 0.1 mm.
The 5,467-pound Xtreme runs smaller 20-inch wheels versus the regular U9’s 21s and gets a square setup with 325-mm wide tires all around.
While the regular U9 uses an 800-volt architecture, the Xtreme uses a 1,200-volt platform, the first ever production car to do so. This theoretically allows for quicker charging but, more importantly, means less heat when generating big power. Kind of key when you’re, you know, cranking it up to 308 mph. For comparison, the Bugatti-adjacent electric Rimac Nevera R topped out at 268.2 mph.
As if it wasn’t already blatantly clear what exactly this car was made to gun for, BYD (Yangwang is the luxury arm, like Lexus is to Toyota) is only building 30 U9 Xtremes, the exact same number of Chiron SS 300+’s Bugatti built back in the day. And to make sure we don’t have another SSC Tuatara situation, here’s the onboard footage receipt, starring German racing driver Marc Basseng.
What does this prove? Not much, obviously. Top speed is merely a bragging right, albeit an impressive one. What might be more impressive is the cost. A Bugatti Chiron SS costs something shy of $4 million. The regular U9 is about $270,000. Even if the Xtreme version were to be 2x the cost of the base model, that’s still an eighth of the cost of the Bugatti.
It also looked like the car had a little more speed in it, meaning the vehicle was awfully close (at 492.22 kph) to crossing the 500 kph barrier. There are not many places to attempt this kind of speed, and I’d be curious to see what it could do at Ehra-Lessien, where Bugatti tests. That facility has a straight that’s nearly twice as long as ATP’s.
Top screengrab: BYD Europe
I bet they can do 500 km/h – he had to slow down in the end, but it looks there was enough room to keep going for another 10 seconds. Near the peak he was still gaining about 1 km per second. So 5 seconds more …
The Chinese manufacturers are going from strength to strength. I saw a report last week (Bloomberg?) that China is graduating 10 times as many mechanical engineers as the USA. The engineers are being hired for the equivalent of US$3000 per month. BYD has as many engineers as Tesla has employees. That huge talent pool is why Xiaomi was able to start up their automotive division and create their first cars so fast.
And the US? We’re threatening higher learning, sowing distrust of teachers and cutting back on science. For the first time in the countries history, we are going to have less doctors because of cuts to medical education grants. The US is truly spiraling into a Third World country.
But those liberal tears back in November were delicious, amirite? :eyeroll:
We’d have a lot more doctors if we could get rid of the AMA’s monopoly.
It was a matter of time before this happened but I really thought the legacy OEMs would have had more wherewithal to snag this achievement before someone else did. BYD is going to eat everyone’s lunch at this rate