Swiss Students Break World Record for Fastest Electric Car Ever
When you hear that the fastest electric car ever was recently built, you probably expect it to be coming from one of the big teams in Formula E—but you’d be wrong. Rather than a Formula E team setting a world’s record for an electric car, it was instead a group of students in Switzerland.
Earlier this week, the Formula Student Team at Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) set a world record, going from 0 to 62 (0 to 100 kph) in just 1.513 seconds. The team reached this record-breaking time with a race car called the Grimsel.
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The team consists of students at ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. They built the Grimsel themselves, and ran and filmed the test at the Dübendorf air base near Zurich. As if the speed and time weren’t impressive enough, the students managed to set this record in just under 30 meters, which is about 100 feet. The new record replaced the previous world record of 1.779 seconds, which was set last year by the University of Stuttgart.
There were a number of design technologies that went into building the record-breaking Grimsel. The car itself only weights 370 pounds thanks to the extensive use of carbon-fiber components. It has a specially built wheel hub motor for each wheel and is capable of generating 200 horsepower and 1,250 lb-ft of torque.
As if that wasn’t enough, the students also gave each wheel its own traction control system.
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The Grimsel is most definitely not a street car and would never be a production vehicle, but still—the amount of engineering creativity that went into building this vehicle is phenomenal.
Watch the Grimsel beat the world record in the video below.
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News Source: ETH Zurich
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