On an overcast day last September, French race car driver Romain Dumas steered a very strange car up the side of Tianmen Mountain, in the southern Chinese province of Hunan. His fully electric, Volkswagen ID.R prototype — a carbon-fiber rocket with a rear wing like an orca’s tail — was so fast it had caused test drivers to black out, and it howled like a banshee around 99 hairpin turns on a route 6.78 miles long and 4,200 feet high.
Seven and a half minutes had passed when Dumas reached
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