Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats will soon be the setting of an attempt to establish the world's fastest car.
Venturi Automobiles plans on setting this new record this summer with an electric "bullet car" called the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 (VBB-3), which they collaborated on with student engineers at Ohio State University, according to the Daily Mail. The Monaco-based organization previously attempted to establish the new record but had to put those plans off because of bad weather, which included flooding in 2013 and slush in 2015.
With nearly 3,000 horsepower and the ability to hit speeds as high as 372 miles per hour, the VBB-3 is the most powerful electric car in the world to date. The 12-meter vehicle can go from 0 to 60 mph in only two seconds, which puts it just ahead of Tesla's Model S, which can do the same in 3.2 seconds.
Venturi will attempt to beat the current land speed record for a battery-powered car of 307 mph, which the automaker set with its VBB-2.5 in 2010, CNN reported. The team is hoping for a dryer summer to avoid the problems it experienced in previously attempts.
"It's very exciting. The speed, for sure, is like nothing else on Earth," lead project engineer Delphine Biscaye said, adding that the team also hopes to develop new technologies out of the initiative. "All the knowledge we have learned from this project and the testing we've done with VBB-3 is now used by engineers in the industry that are doing production cars."
The Bonneville Salt Flats was where Malcolm Campbell's Bluebird became the first car to break 300 mph, which the vehicle accomplished in 1935.
Biscaye said that the technology in the VBB-3 is also being used in Formula E, the world's only electric car race series, and that many of the engineers that work on the project are now working for other automakers and even NASA, CNN noted.
"It's really motivating to see that it's not only the world of motorsport that is interested in our project," she said. "People everywhere see the importance of this vehicle for research and the development of electric vehicles."
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