Richard Hammond drives Chinese hypercar that's the world's fastest car and says it 'scares him'
Published on Feb 23, 2026 at 7:18 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Feb 23, 2026 at 7:18 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Emma Matthews
Richard Hammond is enjoying his career after The Grand Tour with some old-school test drives, including one with the Chinese EV hypercar that’s currently the fastest car in the world.
Hammond has a ‘troubled’ past with extremely fast EVs, but this review went well.
Even though the car did, in his own words, ‘scare’ him.
And what he had to say about it was interesting.
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The Yangwang U9X is currently the fastest car in the world
The Yangwang U9X – X simply stands for Xtreme – is the fastest car in the world at the moment.
It puts out nearly 3,000hp, and has a top speed of 308mph (495km/h).
Despite weighing over 2.5 tons, the car boasts an unprecedented 1,200hp per ton due to the incredible amount of power produced by its four motors.
Richard Hammond drove it for the DriveTribe YouTube channel, and his take was interesting.
The metaphor he used renders the idea perfectly.
In his view, accelerating with this car feels like ‘firing a cannon,’ and the car doesn’t really accelerate: it ‘relocates’ from point A to point B.
But more importantly, according to Hammond, this car represents a revolution in the car world.
A new benchmark for everyone else, not just EV makers.
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Richard Hammond has a complicated history with high-performance cars is
About 20 years ago, Hammond famously survived a dramatic accident on Top Gear, and after the initial scare, this sort of became a running gag on both Top Gear and The Grand Tour.
To be fair, those recurring jokes were half-warranted, and half… not.
All three Top Gear and Grand Tour presenters damaged cars and crashed quite frequently.
But Hammond was the unfortunate protagonist of the two worst accidents on the shows.
After the 2006 Vampire dragster crash – almost exactly 10 years later – Hammond crashed a Rimac Concept_One, the Nevera’s ‘granddad’, during a hill climb in Switzerland while filming The Grand Tour.
After beginning his automotive writing career at DriveTribe, Alessandro has been with Supercar Blondie since the launch of the website in 2022. In fact, he penned the very first article published on supercarblondie.com. He’s covered subjects from cars to aircraft, watches, and luxury yachts - and even crypto. He can largely be found heading up the site’s new-supercar and SBX coverage and being the first to bring our readers the news that they’re hungry for.
