More importantly, the students can celebrate setting a world record in acceleration for an electric auto. A team based out of Switzerland has just shattered the acceleration record for EVs, hitting 100 km/h in a staggering 1.513 seconds. Its 1.513-second time shaved two full tenths of a second off the previous world record, and it used a light carbon fiber body and individually traction-controlled wheels to pull it off.
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This speed is half a second faster than Tesla and also beats Zombie 222 Electric Mustang. To achieve this kind of feat, the vehicle is made mostly of carbon fiber, uses four-wheel drive, and has an onboard computer that applies traction control to each individual wheel.
As for what’s next for the AMZ team – which is made up of students from Swiss universities ETH Zurich and Hochschule Luzern – that’s not clear, but it’s entirely possible that the work done on traction and motor control could be essential in helping future electric vehicles make the most of their power.
The previous world acceleration record was 1.779 seconds, a time claimed a year ago by a team from the University of Stuttgart.
So far, no petrol-powered production auto has managed to hit the same speed in a comparable time.
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The cars in Formula SAE never race wheel-to-wheel, for the teams build one prototype auto and demolition is risky. Teams building the cars for this competition often aim at breaking world records. Moreover, the students participating in the competition as drivers do not have formal racing training. And if you look at the rest of the footage from this and AMZ’s other videos, these cars also look like a total blast to drive (aka please someone let me drive one).
