The 2010s were a stellar decade for fast cars. As engineers found new ways to squeeze more and more power out of the traditional internal-combustion lumps we know and love, performance levels climbed to nearly absurd heights. Acceleration times dropped precipitously; by 2019, four-ton-plus sedans were regularly cracking off 0-60 runs of less than three seconds, and super sports cars were cracking into the nines in the quarter-mile.
But fun as acceleration times are to compare, no measure of automotive performance prompts nearly as much barstool banter as top speed. Even if 200-plus-mph speeds are utterly inaccessible to most of us, they summon up the sort of wonder and awe that no brutal launch ever could.
Now, there’s a lot of contention out there about what exactly signifies a “fast car.” For the purposes of this list, we’re keeping it neat and tidy: “fastest” refers to top speed (if this were about acceleration times, that would be the “quickest cars”), and there needs to be public, reputable documentation of the car’s top-speed run.* Plenty of automakers claim their cars can way faster than 200 mph, but if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the speeding is in the GPS.
*With one exception we’ll explain at the end.
Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 304+ — 304 MPH
BugattiAs the 2010s wound down, it started to seem like Bugatti — a mainstay of “fastest cars” lists ever since it came back to life with the 1,000-hp 16.4 Veyron in 2005 — might not be able to reclaim its title as the speediest ride. Then, a few months before the end of the decade, the carmaker announced that it had not only broken every other production car speed record, but it had also become the first car to break 300 miles per hour. Granted, the Guiness Records folks won’t certify it because they demand runs in both directions, but unless Bugatti had a secret 27-mph tailwind in just the right place, their claim is effectively unchallengable.
