A New U.K. Race Car Boasts Zero to 60 in 1.4 Seconds. And You Can Buy One in the U.S. Next Year.

The fastest cars you can buy are all electric. Cars with zero-to-60 times under two seconds are the Rimac Nevera and its close relative the Pininfarina Battista, the Tesla Model S Plaid Edition, and the Lucid Air Sapphire.

Now, add one more: the British-made McMurtry Spéirling. At a Silverstone track event in December, Mat Watson of the YouTube channel Carwows drove the electric, rear-wheel drive Spéirling PURE model to 60 miles an hour in 1.4 seconds, with zero to 100 in 2.63 and a quarter mile in 7.97. The PURE is a racer in an edition of 100, but McMurtry said it will eventually be producing a street-legal version.

The price in the U.K. for the handmade PURE is £895,000, and in the U.S. around US$1 million. McMurtry Automotive was founded in 2016 and based in England’s posh Cotswolds region of Gloucestershire. Managing Director Thomas Yates comes from Formula 1, and the company’s focus is on race-bred technology. Testing, in secret, occurred in the U.K. at tracks such as Castle Combe and Donington Park. The first reveal to the public was at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2021, with racers Derek Bell and Alex Summers giving demonstration runs. The next year, the PURE set a hill climb record at Goodwood (going up in 39.08 seconds).

Miller Motorcars of Greenwich, Connecticut, which also handles Ferrari, Bugatti, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, and other luxury brands, announced it was taking on McMurtry in January. The record-breaking car was shown by its battery supplier at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month, but will also be making an appearance in Greenwich, with an open house Feb. 3. The West Coast dealer is O’Gara Motorsport, and the star car was in California at Thermal Raceway earlier this month for a demonstration.

The record-setting McMurtry Spéirling PURE on display at CES this year.
Jim Motavalli

Evan Cygler, director of special projects at Miller, tells Penta he was “completely dumbfounded” to encounter the rear-wheel drive McMurtry PURE in England. “They purposely came out with a finished car at Goodwood to break a record, and achieved the goal,” Cygler says. “The sound of it is incredible, as is the tiny size. We are passionate about our business, so we told them that if there was an opportunity to sell these cars, we’d love to be involved.”

Miller will support these track-only cars with its own track days at Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park, Cygler says. “It is less than two hours away and a fun place to host our customers for a day,” he says. “The Spéirling PURE is a cool weekend racer, and definitely something different. Whether you are into EV products or not, you have to love this.” Miller expects to get one or two PURE cars in 2025, he added. McMurtry will also host customers at private track events in the U.K.

The Spéirling reportedly offers 1,000 horsepower and 1,033 pound-feet of torque from two electric motors. Keeping it on the track are a pair of huge turbines (adapted from Formula 1 and Can Am) located behind the single occupant that extract air from under the car and produce more than 4,000 pounds of downforce. The battery is relatively small at 60 kilowatt-hours, but the carbon fiber-bodied car is so light at approximately 2,200 pounds that it has an estimated 300 miles of range (driven lightly, and on the forgiving European WLTP cycle). Top speed is around 200 mph.

The battery pack in the PURE prototype uses Molicel cells that can fast charge in 20 minutes, with rapid cell cooling. A charge can get the car around Silverstone track for 10 laps. Customer cars will use next-generation cells that are still in development.

The cockpit of the Spéirling PURE is a tight fit, and entry is made easier by a removable steering wheel. The single occupant sits on the rear fender and swings his or her body through the narrow opening, then drops into place. It’s a racer’s view forward, with no infotainment or anything else extraneous to ultra-high-speed driving. The Spéirling PURE may not be useful for getting groceries, but it offers the ultimate acceleration experience.

AI agents like Muse can already find you the cheapest hotel room in Paris. But they can’t locate a cheaper version of that Catskills cabin you’ve been eyeing, because it might only be available on Airbnb ABNB -1.43%decrease.

Investors should pay attention to that distinction. When Meta Platforms META 3.38%increase launched its Muse agent last month, travel stocks including Booking Holdings BKNG -1.19%decrease, Expedia and Airbnb all fell sharply.

Airbnb, though, has a real chance to emerge as a winner from the upheaval. The catch: Its stock already reflects above-industry growth. To justify its valuation, Airbnb will need to turn repeat customers into loyal ones.

Online travel companies make much of their money by simplifying search and collecting fees on bookings. AI agents threaten that model.

But not all travel marketplaces are equally exposed. Booking and Expedia largely sell hotel rooms that travelers can also book directly or through competing sites. If an agent can find the same room elsewhere, it has little reason to favor either Booking or Expedia.

Booking and Expedia also sell sponsored listings that steer travelers toward particular properties. Wells Fargo estimates those will account for about 8% of Expedia’s revenue and a much higher percentage of profit next year.

Airbnb has more ways to adapt. More than half its listings are available only on its platform, and more than 90% of its traffic comes directly to its app or website.

The customer relationship doesn’t end after booking, either. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke notes that 90% of Airbnb guests go on to message their hosts about arrival times, keys or local taxes, giving Airbnb a connection to both sides of the transaction.

How the companies have responded to the possible agentic future is telling.

Expedia quickly signed on as a Muse partner. Airbnb hasn’t, and Chief Executive Brian Chesky says AI chatbots have so far been a boon, sending customers to Airbnb’s website.

Chatbots might work for buying paper towels, he quipped at a Skift conference last month, but people enjoy planning trips. He argued that browsing dozens of homes isn’t something a text-based chatbot is well suited for.

Still, the AI jitters arrived just as Airbnb was persuading investors it deserved its pricey multiple. For years after its 2020 initial public offering, the stock—which trades around 25 to 30 times forward earnings—went nowhere. Investors saw a mature operator trading at a growth premium.

This year, Airbnb growth seems to be accelerating. The stock jumped in August after the company raised its full-year revenue-growth guidance with its second-quarter results. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski credits a run of product improvements under a revamped leadership team.

Among the changes: letting guests reserve now and pay later, adding hotels, and a redesigned home page and app. Investors were also betting on what comes next, including thousands more hotels, car rentals and, eventually, advertising.

The irony is that some of those growth drivers push Airbnb closer to the kind of business Booking and Expedia run—the kind of business AI agents could threaten. Even if AI agents capture a large share of travel planning and booking, Airbnb would capture the demand. But it and others would slowly lose control over how customers find and choose properties.

That would undermine the advertising opportunity investors are counting on. The bigger point for Airbnb and other marketplaces is that losing control of customer acquisition could mean surrendering some of their pricing power and margins.

To bulletproof itself, Airbnb might look to another e-commerce giant that has so far kept AI agents at arm’s length: Amazon.

Like Amazon, Airbnb has a loyal customer base and hard-to-match supply. But it has nothing like Prime membership to make customers think twice before taking their business elsewhere.

That is where loyalty comes in. Business travelers stick with Hilton or Marriott because enough nights earn them perks. Leisure travelers rarely accumulate stays with one chain. Airbnb has millions of listings and plenty of repeat customers, but no broad rewards program. It has begun experimenting with credits on hotel stays, but it should make loyalty a priority, not just a promotion.

Airbnb also plans to launch its own AI agent next year. But travelers using an agent might still want it to search Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking and hotel websites alike, rather than limit itself to one company’s inventory.

Eventually, Airbnb might have to strike deals with agent makers, using its unique homes as leverage to negotiate favorable terms, says Gawrelski. Such deals, along with rewards for loyal guests, could over the long term eat into the company’s roughly 13% take rate, he adds. But if they bring in enough additional bookings, the trade-off could be worthwhile.

History offers a reason not to panic. The shift from desktop to mobile unsettled investors in Alphabet and Amazon, but both emerged as major beneficiaries. Companies with valuable assets can come out of a platform shift stronger, if they adapt quickly enough.

Airbnb has homes the bots can’t easily replace. Now it needs to give guests a reason to insist on booking them there.

A New U.K. Race Car Boasts Zero to 60 in 1.4 Seconds. And You Can Buy One in the U.S. Next Year.

AI-powered travel agents are challenging online booking platforms, but Airbnb’s exclusive listings and direct customer relationships could give it an edge. Its next challenge: turning repeat guests into loyal customers through stronger rewards and innovation.