Shelby Supercars: Meet a really quick Tuatara

Shelby Supercars says the car it hopes will become the fastest production car in the world will be called the SSC Tuatara. Photo / Supplied

It may be idle and described as an evolutionary retard, but the tuatara has been chosen as the inspiration for a new million-dollar American supercar.

Shelby Supercars says its V8, 1350 horsepower car - designed to take on the world's fastest production car, Bugatti's Veyron - will be named after the famously languid New Zealand reptile.

The Tuatara supercar will have to move quickly - more than 430km/h - to take the title from Bugatti.

While capable of bursts of speed, the tuatara sits motionless most of its life. But the company seems happy with its choice.

"The name Tuatara was inspired by a modern day New Zealand reptile that bears the same name," it says.

"This reptile's name translated from the Maori language means 'peaks on the back', which is quite fitting, given the winglets on the back of the new car."

Only a dozen Tuataras are expected to be produced, at a price of about $1 million.

The founder of Shelby Supercars, Jerod Shelby, said the name choice was based on the 2008 discovery by evolutionary biologist Professor David Lambert.

His researchers found that although tuatara had remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they were evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined.

"The tuatara possesses the fastest evolving DNA in the world - and among the world's greatest supercar manufacturers, so does SSC," said Mr Shelby.

"We felt that the fastest evolving DNA was a perfect definition of SSC's latest project," he said.

The car body, chassis and wheels will be made of high-tech carbon fibre, and its crash cells will be constructed from aluminium.

The supercar's beast of an engine is a twin-turbocharged Quad Cam 7-litre V8.