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.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

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.

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.