smb

BYD just got Abu Dhabi to shut down a desert highway so its electric hypercar could hit 503 km/h, about 313 mph. That made it the first production car in history past 500. At that speed you cross a football field in about two-thirds of a second, and the car needed a whole highway because its test track in Germany literally ran out of road. Back in September 2025 at Papenburg, the Yangwang U9 Xtreme came off the banked curve doing around 300, hit 496 on the straight, and started drifting toward the left wall. Marc Basseng had to lift off with more still left in it, and the car sat stuck at 496 for over a year. Those last few km/h are brutal because of air. Drag goes up with the square of your speed, and the power you need to push through it goes up with the cube, so going from 400 to 500 is only 25% faster but takes roughly twice the power. Up near the top, almost all of the car's 3,000 horsepower is getting burned just to hold its speed against the wind. What's left over for accelerating is a trickle, so the last bit eats a ton of road. Everybody who's chased this number has run out of road. Bugatti needed the 8.8 km straight at Volkswagen's private Ehra-Lessien track to reach 490 in 2019, and then announced it was done with top speed records. Koenigsegg built the Jesko Absolut for exactly this number, and Christian von Koenigsegg admitted a 3-mile runway would only get it to about 85% of what it can do. No Jesko has officially gone past 500. So BYD went looking for a road. Stella Li said in July she wanted a 15 km straight in the UAE and would ask the police for one. Last Sunday Abu Dhabi closed 10 km of the E11 out in the desert, Basseng went back out, and the whole run from launch to stop used 9.2 km of highway. It was one direction only, same as Bugatti's record, and the FIA made it official today. Bugatti spent 14 years getting from 408 to 490 km/h, and the original U9 went from 309 in January 2024 to 503 in less than three years.