Category: Speed

Hyundai’s latest show car fits between the Ioniq 5 and the Inster, setting its sights on the Volkswagen ID.3.

Volkswagen’s next EV act has actual buttons, improved batteries and software, and doesn’t look like a spaceship.

Believed to preview an Audi counterpart to Porsche’s electric 718 Boxster and Cayman, this concept shows that Audi design is back, baby.

The pedals and steering wheel can retract, and the bodywork vibrates to remove sand.

A smaller, more affordable Hyundai EV will be revealed soon for Europe. Does it have a shot anywhere else in the world?

• Even three years on, the Tesla Model S Plaid can still humiliate a supercar.
• Even with less weight and more power, the 2025 Corvette ZR1 loses every time.
• The Tesla rockets ahead in all drag races in this video, never giving the Corvette a chance.

The hype around the Tesla Model S Plaid has mostly died off since the car is now around three years old and it’s no longer the only EV with 1,000 horsepower or more. However, even if it’s not the newest electric sedan with whiplash-inducing acceleration, its 0 to 60 mph time of 1.9 seconds is still hard to beat, even in cars with more power.

You would think the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, with its monumental 5.5-liter flat-plane crank V-8 engine that churns out 1,064 hp, would have no problem out-accelerating a Model S Plaid, which was recently given a very mild update. The Vette is only rear-wheel drive, so it needs four-tenths more to hit sixty from a standstill. However, its superior power, combined with much less weight, should give it the edge in a drag race against the Tesla. Right?

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It turns out that the Tesla starts ahead and stays ahead throughout an entire quarter-mile drag race. It’s not even close. The Model S Plaid consistently does quarter-mile runs in the low nine-second range, while the Corvette struggles to dip below 10 seconds in this video by DragTimes.

The Plaid has considerably more torque, 1,050 pound-feet versus 828 lb-ft in the Corvette, but it’s also over 1,100 pounds heavier, coming in just shy of 5,000 lbs. The Corvette’s power-to-weight advantage is undeniable, though, and it should come much closer to matching the Model S through the quarter-mile.

The first run was the best for the Corvette, with its best time to 60 feet of 1.57 seconds. The Tesla had a 1.46-second time in the same run, but it shoots ahead as if the difference was far greater than that. It almost makes the ZR1 look like it’s struggling to accelerate, but that’s just how big a difference there is in sheer acceleration between these two cars.

In all subsequent runs, the Tesla beats the Corvette by a bigger margin. Judging by how quickly it sprints ahead, the ZR1 would likely not be able to catch up even if this were a longer race. Maybe in a one-mile straight-line sprint, it could claw back some of the difference and take the lead from the Tesla, whose acceleration does begin to taper off after it reaches 150 mph and approaches its top speed of 200 mph.

Maybe it just takes an even crazier Corvette ZR1 to beat a Plaid.

• Drag race video pits the Kia EV6 GT against a Ferrari Purosangue.
• The two cars are evenly matched on paper, with a slight power-to-weight advantage to the Ferrari.
• The Kia beats the Ferrari every time.

Rooting for the underdog is an automatic winning ticket in a straight-line drag race between the revised Kia EV6 GT and the fire-snorting Ferrari Purosangue. These two vehicles do look a bit alike, but one is electric, while the other uses a monster of a naturally aspirated V12 engine, and the latter also costs several times more.

The UK’s Carwow pitted the two in a drag race, showing how paying more these days doesn’t necessarily mean you get more performance. The Kia EV6 GT features a revised dual-motor powertrain that now pushes 641 horsepower (with temporary overboost) and 568 pound-feet of torque, which gives it a claimed acceleration time from 0 to 60 mph (96 km/h) in a claimed 3.5 seconds with launch control enabled.

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However, independent tests have shown it to be a few tenths quicker to sprint, which explains why it can beat the 715-hp Purosangue, whose claimed sprint time to sixty is 3.3 seconds.

Throughout all of the runs in the video, the Kia not only pounces off the line quicker than the Ferrari, but it also increases its lead throughout.

Ferrari claims a 4,482-pound (2,033 kg) dry weight for the Purosangue, but Car and Driver weighed one and found it was closer to 4,850 lbs (2,200 kg). The second figure almost perfectly matches the Kia’s claimed weight, which is 4,884 lbs (2,215 kg).

So the EV6 GT has a lower power-to-weight ratio but 60 lb-ft more total torque than the Purosangue.

It has no trouble keeping the Ferrari behind it, run after run. The only time the Ferrari wins is when host Mat Watson switches the car into the driving mode that simulates the power delivery of a combustion engine, complete with fake gear changes. This was only for one run when the Ferrari sped ahead and won, but it was not a representation of the Kia’s full performance potential.

The Ferrari Purosangue costs over $395,000 without any options, while the Kia EV6 GT has a starting price of $65,275. That makes the Italian stallion almost exactly six times more expensive, and even with its signature design, lavish interior and luxurious toys, it becomes kind of hard to justify, although Purosangue buyers also pay into the badge and its aura.

The fact that a Kia can show it a clean pair of taillights in an outright acceleration run really says a lot about today’s performance car scene and how dramatically it has changed over the last decade.

• Electric powertrains make any vehicle, no matter its shape or weight, very quick in a straight line.
• With over 1,000 horsepower and all-wheel drive, the Rivian R1S Quad and Lucid Gravity Dream Edition are as quick as supercars once were.
• These two most powerful electric SUVs are evenly matched in a quarter-mile drag race, but the Lucid just has the edge.

Drag races may seem trivial to some, but they help put cars’ performance into perspective. They often yield surprising results and unexpected winners, which accelerate much quicker than they would have any right to. That’s the case for both the Lucid Gravity Dream Edition and the new quad-motor version of the Rivian R1S, both of which are quick enough to move your eyeballs from the front of your head to the sides.

Jason Cammisa assembled quite the roster for his latest Hagerty drag race, which included combustion vehicles, electric vehicles and one exceptionally fast plug-in hybrid. The stars of the show were the two new SUVs, though.

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With four new Gen 2 motors that give it a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet, the R1S Quad catapults itself off the line. With launch control enabled, it lowers the nose before blasting off in a similar manner to Tesla’s Chetah Stance feature. Even with the nose hunkering down, which is done to push it into the tarmac to get extra traction, the front tires still spin a bit of the power away before hooking up.

Seeing the R1S Quad launching is quite something, but as this video proves, it’s not quite as quick off the line as the new (and much less powerful) Porsche Macan Turbo EV. With 630 hp and 833 lb-ft of torque, the top electric Macan leaves the two larger, heavier and more powerful SUVs for dead, but then their higher output allows them to quickly reel it in.

The Macan EV’s superb sprint ability can also be attributed to its much lower weight, which would definitely give it an edge if a corner was involved, like in Edmunds’ U-Drag races, which also test braking and cornering. The R1S Quad quickly catches up and passes the lower-powered Porsche, and it looks like it’s headed for a win.

Meanwhile, the Lucid Gravity Dream Edition is behind both of these vehicles with its gentler start. However, once it does get going, it reveals that it has a lot more pulling power and takes the win every time. As it approaches the end of the quarter-mile run, the R1S Quad is approaching its limited top speed of 130 mph, while the Lucid keeps pulling since it can go all the way up to 155 mph. The Rivian’s acceleration begins to taper off, which is what allows the Lucid to take the lead.

What makes the Lucid’s performance even more impressive is that it comes from just two motors, not four like in the Rivian. It makes more power, 1,070 hp, but a bit less torque, 1,107 lb-ft, and it carries a few hundred pounds less weight, helping it accelerate even at higher speeds. Jason Cammisa describes it as “pulling like a Boeing” with its very high trap speed at the end of each quarter-mile run.

Six minutes, twenty-two seconds. That’s long—or really, how little—it took a stripped-out prototype version “China’s Apple Car” to lap the 12.9-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife. 

This is not the first time that a variant of the Xiaomi SU7 has set a wild lap time at the Nürburgring. Last fall, the same car did the lap in 6:46.874, beating out even the mighty Porsche Taycan Turbo GT (though the two exist in different classes, so it’s not a true one-to-one comparison).

Today, however, the Chinese tech giant announced that it’s beaten that record by a wide margin. “Under optimal conditions, the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype achieved an even faster lap time, improving by 24 seconds to 6:22.091,” the automaker announced. That’s a new prototype lap record, and it puts the car in third place on the Nordschleife leaderboard.

But the crazy prototype is one thing: the production model is another. And the consumer-focused SU7 Ultra did 7:04.957, the automaker announced recently, officially beating out that Taycan by a good three seconds. To commemorate this achievement, Xiaomi is releasing a Nürburgring Limited Edition version of the SU7, complete with the Track Package and loads of carbon fiber. 

It’s priced at 814,900 yuan in China, or about $114,000 at current exchange rates. But anyone in China who’s interested probably already has one on order; only 10 will be made in 2025, and 100 will ever be made in total. “The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra ‘Nürburgring Limited Edition’ represents the ultimate factory-built, road-legal four-door car with championship-level equipment,” the automaker said in a statement.

While it can feel hard to care about something sold only in China—for now, anyway—the point is this: the smartphone, tablet and tech giant Xiaomi is very serious about the EV market, and very serious about challenging the best on their home turf. Powered by a 93.7-kilowatt-hour battery and packing three electric motors, the SU7 Ultra packs 1,526 horsepower and can do zero to 60 mph (0-100 km/h) in a little under two seconds. It’s nothing less than a direct shot at Porsche and the like. 

The news came amid a raft of other announcements today from Xiaomi as it expands further into the EV space, including about the YU7 SUV, a hotly anticipated Tesla Model Y competitor coming soon. Drawing on its experience in the battery and software space, Xiaomi is quickly becoming one of the technology leaders in the automotive sector as well—and clearly, it’s got something to prove to the rest of the world.

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

Meet the Concept AMG GT XX, a lightly disguised performance EV that simulates gears and a V8 engine.