Was it really that long ago that 200 mph was the top speed for supercars? That’s 200 mph, a speed that was achievable for cars such as the Ferrari F40 and RUF CTR Yellowbird in the late 1980s. Nearly twenty years later, in April 2005, a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 topped 400 mph and 250 mph, and it was a fearsomely powerful car with over 1,000 horsepower coming from its engine. Eight-liter quad-turbo W16.
Nowadays, the top 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 pursuing these immense speeds for years, and progress has been relatively rapid. In January 2024, the non-Xtreme Yangwang U9 traveled 309 km/h (192 mph) during airport runway testing in its home country, reaching 391 km/h (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 1,300-horsepower, four-wheel-drive hypercar (Yangwang calls it “all-wheel drive”) that hits 62 mph in 2.36 seconds. And the Xtreme… well, it’s an extreme version of that, and it’s currently the most powerful production car in the world. It is a production car in the sense that 30 cars, already allocated, will be built for Chinese customers invited to buy it, and it is road legal and homologated in China.
First, the Xtreme’s four electric motors each produce 755 horsepower, for a total output of more than 3,000 horsepower. That’s a power-to-weight ratio of 1,217 horsepower per ton, as it weighs around 2,500 kg (5,500 lb), making it heavy for a supercar or hypercar.
Compared to the U9, the U9 built on the car’s 1.2-kilovolt architecture, but because the battery is a full-size 80 kWh LFP battery, its charging should be instantaneous at speeds of 500 kW.
The U9 Xtreme came close to 500 km/h already a year ago. It did 472 mph in August 2025 and 496 mph in September, meaning it topped 300 mph on the latter attempt. These tests were carried out on test tracks, but the new speed record on November 1 was achieved on a public road in Abu Dhabi, naturally without any other traffic sharing the road.
The exact speed reached on November 1 was 503.17 km/h, or 312.66 mph. Guinness World Records and motorsport’s global governing body, the FIA (International Automobile Federation), confirmed the speed, making the U9 Xtreme the world’s fastest production car and the fastest production electric vehicle. At 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.
It is important to note that the earlier speed of 496 km/h was not considered eligible for a speed record, as a vehicle must be tested in both directions within an hour, according to Guinness rules. The new record went in two directions.
Yangwang’s team traveled the six-mile route alone for two days. The section of the E11 highway was cleaned and inspected for debris, first to remove desert sand 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 demands on tires. The manufacturer claims that the tires were specially developed semi-slicks and that the rim surface was treated with a high viscosity product to prevent the wheels from spinning inside the tires when accelerating or braking. The tire manufacturer in this case is Giti Tire, which you may know as GT Radial brand tires.
When Higher speed took a Veyron to 253 mph, James May noted that the Bugatti’s tires would only last fifteen minutes at the car’s top speed. Tire technology must have progressed by leaps and bounds in twenty years, but driving at 300 mph must still eat through tires pretty quickly.
You have to break a few eggs to make a Guinness omelette
During testing in preparation for the Abu Dhabi record attempt, a U9 Xtreme crashed into a barrier at a reported speed of 360 km/h (over 220 mph). Despite the immense speed and the number of parts and debris thrown onto the track, the passenger compartment appeared to have remained intact and the test driver exited the vehicle alone.
In the article of Automotive News Chinathe rear axle is seen torn off, and it should be noted that the vehicle did not catch fire in the accident. It also shows how important aerodynamics are at this type of speed and why the car’s aerodynamics were carefully tweaked to reach 500 km/h after previous attempts.
To improve control and stability, the U9 Xtreme uses an active suspension setup, which Yangwang calls DiSus-X. The system includes electronically controlled two-valve shock absorbers, which are individually adjusted along the way. Combined with the individual wheel drive system adjusting the torque of each wheel more than a hundred times per second, the U9 Xtreme’s body control feels state-of-the-art, even if it couldn’t prevent the aforementioned crash. Yangwang claims the vehicle can lean into corners like a motorcycle while overcoming body roll.
“Speed is all about money: How fast do you want to go? »
Yangwang has yet to confirm the sales price of the production U9 Xtreme hypercars, but while the “base” U9 is priced around $250,000 in China, the Or as a BYD Accessories blog puts it:
Any website publishing an exact Xtreme price without citing an official Yangwang source is guesswork. Taking into account the 30-unit production cap and racing engineering (1,200V platform, titanium carbon-ceramic brakes, custom semi-slick tires), industry estimates place the Xtreme between $400,000 and $700,000. The standard U9 at $252,630 is the only figure confirmed directly by Yangwang.
The on-board video is excellent: you can see that the road is a relatively smooth stretch of eight-lane highway, and the speed record arrives without much drama. The Yangwang is in the leftmost lane and just imagine a lone SUV drifting into your lane when you’re going 300 mph.
Will we ever see the U9 Xtreme outside of China, after the record? Given that Dubai Police recently received a Yangwang SUV for its PR fleet, Dubai is definitely a place where one can expect to spot one.
(Top photo: Yangwang)
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