BERN: Do not underestimate this smallest electric racing car as this hi-tech machine has broken all the previous speed records by accelerating from 0 to 100km/h in under 1.8 seconds.
Called the Grimsel, and developed by Swiss researchers, it broke the previous world record for acceleration by going from 0 to 100 km/h in 1.785 seconds in under 30 metres.
The carbon fibre construction has a total weight of 168 kg and produces about 200 hp (147 kW). Raced by the Formula Student team at the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ), it beat the previous record of 2.134 seconds, which was held by an electric car built by Delft University of Technology.
The new record was set at the military airfield in Dübendorf, where the vehicle reached a speed of 100 km per hour in less than 30 metres.
The new record-breaking vehicle is a Formula Student electric car that was developed and built in less than a year by 30 students at ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The ‘grimsel’ is the fifth AMZ electric car and the result of continuous development.
The carbon fibre construction has a total weight of 168 kg and produces about 200 hp (147 kW). A four-wheel drive is implemented with four specially designed wheel hub motors, which generate a total torque of 1630 Nm at the wheels.
With more than 500 teams, Formula Student is the world’s biggest competition for engineers and is held annually at various locations around the globe. With three overall wins and an average of 920 points out of a possible 1,000, the ‘grimsel’ is AMZ’s most successful car. And with its victories in Austria and Spain, it achieved the two highest scores in the European history of Formula Student.
These further strengthened AMZ’s standing at the top of the Formula Student world rankings and demonstrated the potential in electric drive concepts.
