It’s a Superpower and home of Superman, but can the U.S. build a supercar?

The Ford Model T. Pick-up trucks. Drag racers. The beach buggy. America has given the world many distinctive automobiles. Indeed, the USA is in many ways the spiritual home of the car.

But the one thing it doesn’t really do is the supercar. The nearest equivalents are muscle cars, like the Pontiac GTO. But cars like the Bugatti Veyron, the Zonda, the McLaren F1 and other ridiculously fast, and expensive, vehicles seem to emerge only from Europe.

Until now. So far the fastest production car ever is the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport (267mph). All right, it’s the Hennessy Venom, at 270mph. But not officially , because they’re only making 29, and you need to produce 30 to qualify as a production car.

A chap in New York by the name of Kevin Lyons thinks he can do better. He unveiled this at his home town’s motor show a few days ago. It will apparently do 299mph with 1,700bph and take you from 0-60mph in 2.2 seconds.

If you think that’s insanely ambitious, you’re not alone. Plenty of motoring journalists are sceptical about the chances of the Lyons LM2 ever making it on to the tarmac.

Mr Lyons clearly knows a bit about cars (he built a millimetre-perfect Lamborghini Diablo replica from scratch in 2001), but the version on show in New York arrived on a truck, and doesn’t actually go yet. If he ever manages to get his prototype on the road, though, we may all have to rethink our ideas about American cars being happiest tootling along at 55mph.