It ’s a question people have been asking basically since the horseless coach took over as a frame of transportation : What ’s the fastest car ? As early as 1914 , speed freaks took to venues like theBonneville Salt Flatsin Utah to definitively find an reply . Then , pioneering carrying into action driverTeddy Tetzlaff pushed a custom Benz racecarto a respectable 141 miles per hour ( 227 kilometers ) in 1914 . Around the same time , rule begin to be prove around the variation of domain pep pill racing .
The most authoritative ofthese rules standardizedby the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile ( FiA ) is that a driver must make a eminent speed running in one counseling , turn around and make it again in the paired direction . The two speeds are then average together to account for slight variant in lead resistor and road surface .
Fastest Land Speed
Going by FiA judgement , the " Outright World Land Speed Record " achieved by any wheeled vehicle over 1 Swedish mile ( 1.6 kilometers ) with a rolling start , is presently held by a racecar called the ThrustSSC . It achieved a speed of763.035 geographical mile per hour ( 1,227.985 km per hour)in October 1997 and has gone unchallenged for nearly 25 years . ThrustSSC was also the first recorded body politic vehicle to ever give way the well-grounded barrier , at Mach 1.016 .
depend at this affair , you may hardly call it a auto , right ? It ’s power by two massive cat valium engines , so it ’s more like a plane without wing . So what ’s the fastest vehicle a person can actually go out and buy ? That ’s a trickier question to do .
Fastest Production Car
In 2017 , the 1,400 - horsepowerKoenigsegg Agera RStook to the Nevada desert and averaged 277.9 miles per hr ( 447 kilometer per hour ) . Motor summercater data caller RaceLogic also attested to that outpouring ’s results . In 2019 , Bugatti come back with aChiron SS driving 304 air mile per hour(489 kilometer per hour ) . That runnel can hardly be reckon , though , as the car was outfitted with nonproduction streamlined mods specifically tailor to hit that 300 statute mile per time of day mark , and only drive one direction .
Automaker SSC ( no relation to ThrustSSC ) then reach the world stage in 2020 , with a young Tuatara hypercar . In a video discharge by the caller , the gondola appear to hit a blazing 331 miles per hr ( 532.6 kilometers per time of day ) one way , with a two - elbow room average of 317 miles per minute ( 510 klick per hour ) . However , there were no independent source to assert the datum , andmany viewers were skepticalthat the cockpit footage was doctor up or otherwise inaccurate .
SSC also claimed that Guinness World Record official were there to find the discharge , butGuinness would afterwards tell CNBCthat they were " not present in any capacity , and have not verified this as a new record . " There is also presently only one Tuatara prototype in existence , thoughthe company saysanother 100 are being bring on .
To stay all uncertainty SSC soon scheduled another running , this fourth dimension with the verification of Racelogic . The Tuatara was then able to squeeze out a 282.9 miles per hour ( 455 km per hour ) middling top speed . That ’s an telling number , but still a moonshot away from SSC ’s anterior claim . The company then prognosticate it would soon break the 300 - barrier once again . In May 2021 , the Tuatara was in transit to a testing web site in Florida when its lading trailer flipped andcaused the car to become discredited . SSC states the car is in rectifiable precondition and would be road - worthy again in a matter of weeks , but no third attempt is currently announced .
Althoughcertain railway car may physically be able to go faster , we are still pass away to consider the Koenigsegg Agera RS as the current fast output car . This is based on the standard that the company has actually sold multiple route - legal copies of the car used in the run , used the right two - pass procedure , and had an independent datum accumulator on - site .
