Yangwang just set a new top speed record with its all-electric U9 hypercar, going 293.5 mph in a speed test and making it what the Chinese marque says is the world’s fastest EV.
The U9 costs something like a quarter-million dollars, and it originally set out to go just 192 mph when it was first announced. That number was clearly lowballing it a little bit, as the car went 233 mph within months. Then the hypercar went 244 mph later last year, behind, among EVs, only the Aspark Owl, which has gone 272.6 mph, and the Rimac Nevera R, which has gone 268 mph.
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The U9 has now surpassed those cars during a run at a track in Germany earlier this month. The 2,959 horsepower (you read that right) U9 Track Edition did the run powered by its four electric motors on August 8, with Yangwang publishing a video to prove it.
The hypercar achieved that 293.5 mph with a torque-vectoring system that, impressively, can change the amount of torque to each individual wheel up to 100 times per second. That is fast enough to be almost continuous, meaning the car is constantly monitoring grip and optimizing power to change wheel speeds virtually instantaneously to go ever faster.
A separate system does something similar for the suspension, Yangwang says, performing “rapid, independent vertical adjustments to the suspension at each corner of the vehicle during aggressive acceleration and cornering, or on uneven surfaces.” When it comes to extreme speeds, having the right tires is just as important, and Yangwang teamed up with the Indonesian tire company Giti on a semi-slick tire specifically for the test.
It’s a little complicated when it comes to actual EV speed records, with Guinness recognizing the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 as the current holder. The Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 went 341.3 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2016, though that Buckeye Bullet 3 isn’t a road-going car so much as a vehicle expressly designed to break land speed records. The U9 also apparently only did its run in one direction, as Car and Driver pointed out, when record runs typically go once in opposite directions. Still, the U9 is indisputably fast.
“Last year, I thought I’d peaked,” Marc Basseng, the German driver who previously took the U9 to 244 mph, said in a statement. “I never expected to break my own record so soon—but here we are, at the same track, with new technologies that have made it possible.”
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