It's a Little Ironic That the Fastest Street-Legal EV in the World Is a Corvette

Electric propulsion and great speeds actually go very well hand in hand, but that usually only happens for a short while, because going fast is the easiest way to quickly deplete a battery. So all those supercars will be fast and they will be fun, but you'll have to buy like five of them if you want to blast around a circuit for a full hour. And given how most of them have a very limited production run and cost zillions of dollars, that idea isn't just stupid but also impossible.

However, with speeds of over 200 mph promised, they'll have no problem setting a new world record for maximum speed achieved by a street-legal electric vehicle. But until that happens, that title belongs to a modified Chevrolet Corvette called Genovation GXE.

The prototype is based on a 2006 Z06 Corvette that loses the V8 engine and replaces it with several state-of-the-art electric motors and a battery pack to provide over 700 horsepower and 600 foot-pounds of torque (812 Nm). This proved enough to give the Genovation GXE the record after only its first day of testing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The modified Corvette registered a top speed of 186.8 mph (300.6 km/h), beating the previous record of 173.2 mph (278.7 km/h) by a pretty significant margin.

So, it's very possible that we'll see this title switch hands very often in the coming years, as the electric sports car market seems to be booming (even though the mass market EVs aren't doing that great yet). Given the ease with which the Genovation GXE achieved this speed, it's very likely the team will try to improve the time in the coming months as well. Whatever happens next, it can only be good for the image the EVs have had until now - or at least until Teslas started beating the hell out of established sports cars on the drag strip.