- BYD’s Yangwang U9 Track Edition packs 2,960 hp, dwarfing the Rimac Nevera’s 1,989 hp.
- It hit 293.54 mph, smashing the Nevera’s 268.2 mph EV record.
- There is no word on pricing yet, but it will likely be considerably more expensive than the $230,000 U9.
Everywhere you look, there’s a Chinese car company eating the world’s lunch in one way or another. Last year, BYD catapulted past Tesla to become the world’s biggest maker of electric vehicles by volume. China’s EVs are often cheaper and higher-tech than offerings from other automakers.
And now they’re faster too. The BYD Yangwang U9 Track Edition just became the world’s EV speed king after hitting a top speed of 293.5 mph (472.4 km/h). That’s not too far off of the world’s fastest gas cars.
The standard U9 supercar has a dual-motor powertrain with 1,287 horsepower, allowing it to accelerate from a standstill to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 2.36 seconds. That puts it among the quickest-accelerating cars in the world. (Oh, and it can also jump.)
BYD has cranked the U9 way past 11 with the new track-focused edition of the model, which gets a quad-motor powertrain primed to break records. Each of the U9 Track Edition’s electric motors generates 744 hp for a monstrous combined total of 2,960 hp sent to all four wheels.
It’s a lot more powerful than the 1,989-hp Rimac Nevera R, the previous record holder for EV speed . There’s also a big difference when it comes to power-to-weight, which is around 800 hp per ton in the Rimac and over 1,000 hp per ton in the YangWang.
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Source: BYD
When Yangwang tested the standard U9’s top speed last year, it achieved a very impressive 243.54 mph (391.94 km/h). Impressive, sure, but not enough to bother the Nevera, which held the record for the world’s fastest EV, with a peak of 268.2 mph (431.45 km/h). Now the U9 Track Edition has shattered the Rimac’s numbers by hitting nearly 300 miles per hour.
It hit a speed that’s only a few miles per hour off some of the fastest cars in the world, like the Bugatti Chiron Supersport 300+, which hit 304.77 mph (489 km/h) in 2019. Watching the video published by BYD on its global YouTube channel, it doesn’t look like the U9 Track Edition’s rate of acceleration wanes as it reaches its record speed.
It’s probably geared for more than it achieved during its record-breaking run, and it has the horsepower to push it even faster. It could even challenge the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut, which may only have 1,600 hp, but it’s very light with a power-to-weight ratio only slightly off the U9 Track Edition’s.
The car that broke the record appears to be the same as what we saw earlier this month in a filing with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which listed its impressive specs. The car that broke the record appears to be missing the big fixed rear wing, which would have added a lot of drag at such a high speed. It also appears to have black tape over some of the panel gaps to make it that little bit more aerodynamic.
BYD hasn’t revealed pricing for the U9 Track Edition, but the regular U9 is one of China’s most expensive vehicles, costing around $230,000. Even if the hot new version was double that with its fancy quad-motor powertrain and other modifications, it would still be considerably less expensive than the Nevera R that it just beat, which costs around $2.5 million and is limited to just 40 examples.
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