Was it really that long ago when 200 mph was the top speed for supercars? That’s 320 km/h, a speed that was attainable for cars such as the Ferrari F40 and the RUF CTR Yellowbird in the late 1980s. Nearly twenty years later, in April 2005, a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 broke 400 km/h and 250mph, and it was a fearsomely powerful car with over 1000 horsepower from its quad-turbo, eight-liter W16 engine.
These days, the big number is 500 km/h (310 mph). It took a Chinese manufacturer to break the 500 km/h barrier for production cars, and the vehicle in question is a Yangwang U9 Xtreme, a 3,019-horsepower electric hypercar.
Yangwang has been chasing these immense speeds for years, and progress has been relatively quick. Back in January 2024, the non-Xtreme Yangwang U9 did 309 km/h (192 mph) in airport runway tests in its homeland, achieving 391 kmh (240 mph) at the Auto Testing Papenburg track in Germany in October of the same year.
The Most Powerful Production Car In The World Is Also The Fastest
The Yangwang U9 is a 1300-horsepower, quad-motor, all-wheel-drive (Yangwang calls it ”individual-wheel-drive”) hypercar that hits 62 mph in 2.36 seconds. And the Xtreme… well, it’s an extreme version of that, and is the most powerful production car in the world at the moment. It’s a production car in the sense that 30 cars, which are already allocated, will be built for Chinese customers who have been invited to buy it, and it is street legal and homologated in China.
First of all, the Xtreme’s four electric motors produce 755 horsepower each, for a total output of over 3,000 horsepower. That’s a power-to-weight ratio of 1,217 horsepower per ton, as it weighs around 2,500 kg (5500 lbs), making it heavy for a supercar or hypercar.
Compared to the U9, the U9 Xtreme uses a 1200-volt architecture instead of an 800-volt one, and is the first production car with a 1200V system. (For example, a Hyundai Ioniq 5 is an 800V car, while a Tesla Model S is a 400V car.) There aren’t even fast chargers set up to take full advantage of the car’s 1.2-kilovolt architecture, but since the battery is a regular-size 80kWh LFP battery, charging it must feel instantaneous at 500kW speeds.
The U9 Xtreme came close to hitting 500 km/h already a year ago. It did 472 km/h in August 2025 and 496 km/h in September, meaning it broke 300 mph on the latter attempt. These runs were done on test tracks, but the new record speed run on November 1 was done on a public highway in Abu Dhabi, naturally without any other traffic sharing the road.
The exact speed achieved on November 1st was 503.17 km/h, or 312.66 mph. Guinness World Records and the global governing body for motorsport, FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), confirmed the speed, making the U9 Xtreme the world’s fastest production car and the fastest production electric vehicle. Behind the wheel was Mark Basseng, a German racing driver who won the GT1 class world championship in 2012, driving a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3.
Importantly, the earlier 496 km/h speed wasn’t considered eligible for a speed record, as a vehicle needs to be tested in both directions within one hour, according to Guinness rules. The new record run was done in two directions.
The Yangwang team had the six-mile road for themselves for two days. The stretch of highway E11 was cleaned and inspected for any debris, first to get the desert sand off, and then to see if the cleaning equipment had left anything on the surface.
You might want to pause there and think about how much 300 mph even demands of the tires. The manufacturer states the tires were specially developed semi-slicks, and the rim surface was treated with a high-viscosity product to prevent the wheels spinning inside the tires during acceleration or braking. The tire manufacturer in this case is Giti Tire, which you might know as GT Radial brand tires.
When Top Gear took a Veyron to 253 mph, James May noted that the Bugatti’s tires would last only fifteen minutes at the car’s top speed. Tire technology must have advanced by leaps and bounds in twenty years, but doing 300 mph must still eat the tires up fairly quickly.
You Gotta Break A Few Eggs To Make A Guinness Omelette
During tests done in preparation for the Abu Dhabi record run attempt, a U9 Xtreme crashed into a barrier at a reported 360 km/h (over 220 mph). Despite the immense speed and the number of parts and debris thrown around the track, the passenger cell appeared to have remained intact, and the test driver reportedly exited the vehicle on his own.
In the article by Car News China, we see the rear axle ripped out, and it’s worth noting the vehicle did not catch fire in the accident. It also shows how important aerodynamics are at these kinds of speeds, and why the car’s aero was carefully honed to reach 500 km/h after previous attempts.
To improve control and stability, the U9 Xtreme utilizes an active suspension setup, which Yangwang calls the DiSus-X. The system features electronically controlled two-valve shock absorbers, which are adjusted individually on the go. Combined with the individual wheel drive system adjusting each wheel’s torque over a hundred times per second, the U9 Xtreme’s body control sounds state-of-the-art, even if it couldn’t prevent the aforementioned crash. Yangwang claims the vehicle can lean into corners like a motorcycle as it overcomes body roll.
“Speed Is Just A Question Of Money – How Fast Do You Want To Go?”
Yangwang hasn’t yet confirmed a sales price for the production U9 Xtreme hypercars, but while the “base” U9 is priced at around $250k in China, the Xtreme can cost several times that. Or as a BYD Accessories blog puts it:
Any website publishing an exact Xtreme price tag without citing an official Yangwang source is guessing. Given the 30-unit production cap and the race-bred engineering (1200V platform, titanium carbon-ceramic brakes, bespoke semi-slick tires), industry estimates place the Xtreme between USD 400,000 and USD 700,000. The standard U9 at USD 252,630 is the only figure confirmed by Yangwang directly.
The in-car video is great: you can see the road is a relatively regular-issue stretch of eight-lane highway, and the record speed arrives without much drama. The Yangwang sits in the leftmost lane, and just imagine a solitary SUV drifting in your lane when you’re doing 300mph.
Will we ever see the U9 Xtreme outside China, after the record run? Given that the Dubai police force recently received a Yangwang SUV for its PR fleet, Dubai’s certainly a place where one could expect to spot one of these.
(Top photo: Yangwang)
I hope McLaren gets credit for it too.