For the better part of a year, members of the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ), students from ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, have spent every spare minute working on creating an electric vehicle, which they named “mythen.” Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles. On the Switzerland Innovation Park in Duebendorf, Switzerland, directly opposite the students’ workshop, AMZ’s racing car accelerated from 0 to 100 km/h (approx. 62.15 mph) in just 0.956 seconds, accomplishing this feat over a distance of merely 12.3 meters (approx. 13 yards). This beats the previous world record of 1.461 seconds, set in September 2022, by a team from the University of Stuttgart by more than a third.
All of mythen’s components, from the printed circuit boards (PCBs) 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 group said the race car weighs in at around 140 kilos (309 pounds). Four-wheel hub motors that the students developed themselves and a special powertrain give the vehicle its impressive power of 240 kilowatts, or around 326 hp, the groups say.
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.
