What's it like to drive 284 mph? Ride along in a Koenigsegg Agera RS and find out

6 years, 11 months ago - 8 December 2017, Autoblog

You know in the car commercials where the fine print reads, "Do not attempt: professional driver on a closed course?" This is that.

Back in November, we told you about a Koenigsegg Agera RS, driven by factory driver Niklas Lilja, that hit a VBOX-verified average top speed of 277.87 miles per hour on a closed-off stretch of Nevada highway outside of Pahrump.

Now Koenigsegg has released a new video of the drive, above. It's the closest any of us will get to the driver's seat of a Koenigsegg, or to nearly 300 mph in a car. The latest video gives you Lilja's POV and lets you watch him do his thing. In our item in November, we had video from the passenger's seat, which gives a bit of a better view of the road. That appears below.

In one direction, the Agera RS hit 284.55 mph; in the other, 272 mph (437 km/h). The official top speed of 277.87 (445 km/h) is the average between the two runs.

It sounds even more impressive when you do the metric conversion: 447.19 kph for the average, and 457.94 on the fastest run.

The Agera RS also logged the record for 0-249-0 mph (that is, 0-400-0 kph), going there and back in 33.29 seconds.

But wait, there's more. It also logged the fastest-ever average speed over a kilometer on a public road, at 276.9 mph; and over a mile, at 276.36 mph.

And it attained the record highest speed ever reached on a public road, which was the 284.55 mph of the first run.

Koenigsegg says at one point, Lilja and the car were traveling at 416 feet per second. Speed per second is a unit of measurement usually reserved for spacecraft.