A team of Swiss students has broken the record for the fastest electric vehicle in the world. For the first time, the most pursued speed in automotive testing has been lowered below 1 second.
The Academic Motorsport Club Zurich (AMZ), made up of students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences, has been building these racing vehicles for many years. In fact, the AMZ team broke its first acceleration world record in 2014 and did so again in 2016.
Since then, a competing team from the University of Stuttgart has claimed the record, which has been dropping from the 1.7-second zone to stand at 1.461 seconds as of September 2022.
So when we say that the AMZ team has smashed the record, we are talking about cutting more than a third of the time. An extraordinary leap.
How? Well, it’s not by adding thousands of horsepower or reducing huge amounts of weight: this little kart weighs 140 kg and only needs 326 hp through its four hub motors to get the job done. The best part is that the driverless power-to-weight ratio is more than 2.3 hp per kg.
And traction is the key here. There’s no power worth a damn if you can’t get it to the ground, and that’s where the AMZ team has made a pretty big improvement. Like the McMurtry Spierling and the Gordon Murray T.50, AMZ’s car, called Mythen, uses a vacuum fan system that sucks the car to the ground, creating considerable downforce.
As a result, Maggetti recorded a blazing sprint from 0 to 100 km/h in 0.956 seconds, with triple figures on the dashboard just 12.3 meters from the starting line. These figures have been certified by Guinness, and the team does not expect the record to fall any time soon.
A full-blown kick in the teeth. Anyone who has driven a fast Tesla knows how crazy a time of 2.3 seconds feels: the idea of accelerating more than twice as fast is sheer madness.
The driver would have experienced just under 3 g of acceleration force that pushed her back in the seat during the record run. Watch the video below, it’s insane.
