SSC Tuatara beats Bugatti’s Chiron prototype to become fastest car in the world: Report

SSC Tuatara becomes world's fastest car (Image: Wikimedia)

The SSC Tuatara hypercar recently broke all records to become the world’s new fastest car. On October 10, the SSC Tuatara posted an average speed of 316.11 mph while driving on a 11.27 km stretch of two-lane Highway 160 near Las Vegas.

According to a Bloomberg report, the world’s new fastest car beat two high marks - set by Bugatti’s Chiron prototype 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 29-year-old Englishman Oliver Webb, who hit a 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 obviously larger budgets, have not been able to achieve,” said Jerod Shelby, founder,  SSC Tuatara.

Notably, SSC is one of the most obscure car makers in the world. The company was started in 1998 with just 24 employees and used to be known as Shelby SuperCars Inc. SSC has no large automotive group and has very small production volume. As such, only 100 SSC Tuataras will ever be produced, at the rate of about 20 cars per year. The starting price of a Tuatara is $1.9 million and the first 12 units have sold out already.

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 car boasts of angled headlights, a 5.9-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine and a seven-speed transmission.

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.