BYD’s Electric Hypercar Eclipses Bugatti Chiron’s Top Speed Record
The YangWang U9 sports car manufactured by Chinese automaker BYD continues to make headlines. Shortly after setting a new record for a production electric vehicle with a top speed of 472.4 km/h, it returned to the track and achieved an insane 496.2 km/h.
The U9 Xtreme (previously U9 Track Edition) pulled this off at the same test facility in Papenburg, Germany, and in the hands of the same professional driver and 24 Hours of Nürburgring champion, Marc Basseng.
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The feat is captured in a video posted on BYD's Facebook page. It looks like the car could have gone a little faster, but Basseng had to take his foot off the gas and apply the brakes to get away from the barrier on the left side of the track.
You know what this means? The YangWang U9 Extreme is faster than the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+, which famously recorded a top speed of 490.5 km/h in 2019. In either case, however, we cannot talk about an official record because it involved a single one-way run as opposed to two runs in opposite directions. In other words, the SSC Tuatara is still technically the fastest production car in the world with a speed of 455.3 km/h.
That said, here we have further demonstration of the technological power of Chinese automakers. Incidentally, the U9 Extreme also claims the title of fastest production EV on the Nürburgring Nordschleife with a lap time of 6:59.157 minutes.
The U9 Extreme’s four motors are capable of revving up to 30,000 rpm and generating a little over 2,950 horsepower in total. Its world-first 1,200V architecture combines with significantly denser batteries than all other BYD models.
What’s more, the car’s ultra-sophisticated torque-vectoring system can adjust torque distribution to each wheel over 100 times per second, while its intelligent body control system—the same one that allows it to jump off the ground when needed—constantly makes subtle adjustments to the suspension in order to minimize pitch and roll.
Only 30 units of the YangWang U9 Extreme are planned.
