Tokyo (SCCJI) – An electric racing car built by students of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has broken the world acceleration record. The electric racing car, named mythen, accelerated from zero to 100 km/h in 0.956 seconds.
A Swiss electric vehicle accelerates from zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds, setting a new record (©Alessandro Della Bella / ETH Zürich).
Confirmed record
The members of the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) are absolutely thrilled. For the better part of a year, these students from ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts have spent every spare minute working on their electric vehicle, which they named mythen, overcoming setbacks and going back to the drawing board time and time again for certain components.
Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles. At the Switzerland Innovation Park in Duebendorf, Switzerland, directly opposite the students’ workshop, their racing car accelerated from zero to 100 km/h in just 0.956 seconds, accomplishing this feat over a distance of merely 12.3 meters. At the wheel was Kate Maggetti. She beat the previous record of 1.461 seconds, set in September 2022 by a team from the University of Stuttgart by more than a third.
Lighter, stronger, more traction
All of mythen’s components, from the printed circuit boards to the chassis and the battery, were developed by the students themselves and optimized for their function. Thanks to the use of lightweight carbon and aluminum honeycomb, the race car weighs in at only around 140 kilos. Four-wheel hub motors that the students developed themselves and a special powertrain give the vehicle its impressive power of 240 kilowatts.
“But power isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to setting an acceleration record – effectively transferring that power to the ground is also key,” says Dario Messerli, head of aerodynamics at AMZ. Conventional Formula One cars solve this through aerodynamics: a rear or front wing pushes the car to the ground. However, this effect only comes into play when the car has reached a certain speed. To ensure strong traction right from the start, the AMZ team has developed a kind of vacuum cleaner that holds the vehicle down to the ground by suction.
The AMZ team had set the world acceleration record for electric cars twice before – in 2014 and again in 2016. In the following years, their record was broken by a team from the University of Stuttgart. Now the world record is back in Swiss hands, and the ETH Zurich students are confident they will not relinquish it again any time soon.
Text: ©ETHZ News (Editing by SCCIJ)
