Swiss electric racing car breaks world record

An electric racing car named mythen has set a new world record for acceleration from zero to 100 km/h. Guinness World Records has confirmed that the electric racing car developed by students of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) has broken the previous world record of 1.461 seconds by more than a third. On the race track in the Innovationspark Dübendorf, mythen accelerated from zero to 100 km/h in 0.956 seconds over a distance of 12.3 meters. 

According to a press release issued jointly by ETH and HSLU, members of the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich from the two universities spent almost a year fine-tuning their electric racing car in preparation for breaking the world record. “Working on the project in addition to my studies was very intense,” says Yann Bernard, head of motor at AMZ. “But even so, it was a lot of fun working with other students to continually produce new solutions and put into practice what we learned in class.”

The students themselves developed and optimized all of mythen’s components. The lightweight electric racing car weighs only around 140 kilos and has 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,” explains Dario Messerli, head of aerodynamics. The rear or front wing commonly used for this purpose in racing cars is only effective when the car has reached a certain speed, so for mythen, the students developed a type of vacuum cleaner that holds the racing car down to the ground by suction. ce/hs