At 508 kmph, reptilian SSC Tuatara hypercar is the world's fastest car

Formed in 1998, SSC is among the most obscure automakers in the world

The world has a new fastest car. The reptilian SSC Tuatara hypercar posted an average speed of 316.11 mph (508.73 km/h) while driving on a 11.27 km stretch of the two-lane Highway 160 outside Las Vegas. The result beat, by a large margin, two high marks set last year by Bugatti’s pre-production Chiron prototype (304.77 mph) and one that the Koenigsegg Agera RS set for production cars in 2017 (277.87 mph). 

Oliver Webb, the 29-year-old Englishman who drove the Tuatara, hit 484.53 kmph) mph on his first run and 532.93 kmph on his second run in the opposite direction. The average of those times will count as the official fastest time. The record-breaking event was verified by two witnesses sanctioned by Guinness World Records.

In an email about the record-setting run, company founder Jerod Shelby characterised it as a David versus Goliath-style victory.

“People may look at SSC and ask if we belong in the hypercar realm, with such stalwart competitors,” he said. “This record is so extremely sweet, knowing that our small organisation 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.  This success tastes even sweeter, taking the news of this victory back to our home state of Washington, where we'd only dreamed of this when we'd started this company in a garage.”

SSC is among the most obscure automakers in the world. Formed in 1998 and counting just 24 employees, the privately held company was formerly called Shelby SuperCars Inc, which inspired its current name. A trained engineer who co-founded a medical device company in the early 1990s, Jerod Shelby is not related to automotive entrepreneur Carroll Shelby, who was featured in 2019’s Ford v Ferrari film.