This Chinese electric car is the fastest four-door to lap the Nurburgring, beating the Tesla Model S and the Mercedes-AMG GT63, but there's a pretty big catch

A Chinese smartphone company now holds the record for the fastest four-door car to lap the storied Nurburgring Nordschleife, a 20.8km race circuit in Germany used as a yardstick for sports car brands around the world.

But there’s a catch, because the car that achieved that lap time isn’t the same as the one it plans to sell to customers for road use.

The SU7 Ultra, an electric car developed by the smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, is the high-performance version of the Xiaomi SU7 sedan, the same car Ford CEO Jim Farley this month admitted he’d been driving for six months in the US and that he “didn’t want to give it up”.

The Ultra, which uses three electric motors for a claimed output of 1138kW and a sprint to 100km/h in just 1.97 seconds, is key to Xiaomi’s plan to hold the the production car lap records at the Nürburgring. But it hasn’t achieved it yet.

The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra that lapped the ‘Ring this week was just a prototype, which the brand admits but was built with assistance from racecar outfit Prodrive for the express purpose of this lap, and is essentially a racing car that uses the electric motors intended for the road-going version.

The lap time it set, an extremely impressive 6 minutes and 46.874 seconds, makes it the fastest four-door car to lap the circuit, though its nature as a stripped-out prototype means it isn’t the holder of the road-legal production car record yet.

For reference, the fastest vehicle to lap the Nurburgring is was the Porsche 919 Hybrid EVO, a modified version of the brand’s WEC endurance racer, with a time of 5:19.546.

The fastest road-legal production vehicle is the AMG One, with a time of 6:29.090 set last month, while the fastest production four-door is currently the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT, but its 7:07.55 lap time is well within reach of the Xiaomi.

While the prototype is likely much lighter and faster than the eventual road version, the car did suffer a power loss for several seconds halfway though the lap. It also seemed to be quite a handful for driver David Pittard. Not for lack of driver skill, as Pittard was part of the winning team in the 2023 24 Hours of Nurburgring race.

While the Prototype won’t entirely reflect the production car’s final specifications, if the road-going version manages to lap the Nurburgring in under 7:07.55, it’ll take the record from the Taycan.