Venturi Sets New Land Speed Record With An Electric Vehicle - 341 MPH

The VBB-3, which stands for Venturi Buckeye Bullet-3, has been driven on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and managed a two-way average of 341 mph, which is the equivalent of 548 km/h. To put this velocity into perspective, the vehicle’s average speed over the two runs was of 152 meters per second, which is the equivalent of 500 feet per second.

In a minute, the VBB-3 could drive 30,000 feet, or 9,144 meters. At this point, you probably have an idea of how fast this thing was at Bonneville. There is a reason for its speed - it had two electric motors that each developed 1,500 HP, or 1,119 kW. Eight lithium-ion battery packs powered the engines.

Venturi shared a shaft for the two motors, and they also shared a cooling system. In record-setting feats like these, engineers prefer to couple multiple smaller engines than attempting an untested, single engine.

This is not the first land speed record attempt by Venturi, as the team plans to reach 400 mph (643 km/h) for five years now. Fortunately, Venturi’s team is ambitious, and has broken its previous record with ease.

It was not all smooth sailing, as the weather conditions prevented multiple attempts, and a bump in the salt track caused a crack in a weld of the coolant reservoir. The driver also had to handle a complicated shift from first to second gear on two transmissions that were operated with electro-hydraulic clutches.

The problem was that the shifting happened at over 8,000 rpm and a velocity of 200 mph (321 km/h), and the transmissions had to be in perfect synchronicity to allow smooth operation and prevent a catastrophic failure of the expensive gearboxes or locking the axles and causing a crash.

Venturi's VBB-3 at Bonneville in 2015