Watch: Hydrogen car breaks land speed record at 406 mph
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- Andy Green, a retired Royal Air Force pilot, piloted a hydrogen-powered car to 406 mph (654 km/h) at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah — the fastest speed ever achieved by a hydrogen-powered car.
- In 1997, Green drove the jet-powered ThrustSSC across Nevada's Black Rock Desert at 763 mph (1,228 km/h), a separate feat that established him in land-speed history.
- Green remains the first and still the only person to have broken the sound barrier on land, via his 1997 ThrustSSC run.
- The hydrogen-car record was set at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, a different venue from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where Green set his supersonic mark 28 years earlier.
Why it matters: Green now holds two distinct land-speed distinctions: the only supersonic land record (763 mph, 1997) and the fastest hydrogen-powered car speed (406 mph, 2025), making him the only person to have piloted both a jet-powered and a hydrogen-powered land vehicle to record-breaking speeds.
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