The “world’s fastest production vehicle” title now belongs to the Tuatara hypercar, built by SSC North America, recently breaking all the existing records.
The American car company announced this achievement last day after a test on October 10 in which the SSC Tuatara marked an average speed of 316.11 mph while driving on an 11.27 km stretch of two-lane Highway 160 near Las Vegas.
As per the media reports, Tuatara beat the production car speed record of two high marks which was set by Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport in 2019 at 304.77 mph and Koenigsegg Agera RS cars in 2017 at 277.87 mph by a huge margin.
The Tuatara was driven by the pro racing driver 29-year-old Oliver Webb outside Las Vegas. The officials used Dewetron GPS measurements that tracked the speed runs with an average of 15 satellites and verified the speed of 301.07 mph on his first run and 331.15 mph on his second run. The average of the two was regarded as the official fastest time. The event was witnessed by persons sanctioned by the Guinness World Records.
“People may look at SSC and ask if we belong in the hypercar realm, with such stalwart competitors. This record is so extremely sweet, knowing that our small organization just achieved something that much more established brands, with much larger engineering and development teams, and larger budgets, have not been able to achieve,” said Jerod Shelby, founder, SSC Tuatara.
The hypercar itself uses a 5.9-liter, twin-turbocharged, flat-plane crank V8 engine that produces 1,750 horsepower on E85, or 1,350 horsepower on 91 octane gasoline. It was designed to have a very low drag coefficient of 0.279.
The price range of Tuatara starts from $1.9 million and the company has announced that only 100 cars will ever be produced, at the rate of about 20 cars per year. Interestingly the first 12 units have been sold out already.
SSC Tuatara uses a 5.9-liter, twin-turbocharged, flat-plane crank.
The Tuatara was named after a species of lizard that is native to New Zealand. The car was designed by Jason Castriota, who says the SSC hypercar looks like a curvier version of the reptile it was named after.
The media reports state that even though the speed run was measured and tested under Guinness specifications, it has not yet officially been certified by Guinness as a world record.
SSC North America
The US-based SSC, formerly known as Shelby SuperCars Inc., is one of the not much known about car makers in the world. The company commenced its operations in 1998 with just 24 employees under the ownership of Jerod Shelby. SSC has no huge automotive group and has a very small production volume which is one reason that the company aims to produce such a small unit of vehicles.
Notably, another SSC car had held the title of the world’s fastest car in the year 2007. Guinness World Records had named the SSC Ultimate Aero as the fastest production car in the world after it had averaged a top speed of 256.18 mph.
