Students from the Federal Polytechnic University of Zurich and the University of Lucerne (Switzerland) have developed an electric vehicle that will break the world record for acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h. Their open-cab electric car reached that speed after just 0.956 seconds. Behind its wheel sat a woman weighing just 40 kilograms, the total power of the engines was 240 kW/326 hp. The experimental vehicle was named Mythen.
12.3 meters to reach 100 km/h
Mythen weighed 140 kilograms thanks to the use of carbon fiber and aluminum; with the driver it was 180 kilograms. Work on it took a year. To increase its grip, the students decided to use a mechanism that is used in Formula One, that is, they created a vacuum under the chassis, which caused the car to “suck” to the road surface. As a result, they say, they were able to achieve a pressure close to twice the weight of the vehicle. The moment the mechanism is activated can be seen in the promotional video at around 1:05 min:
The previous record for acceleration to 100 km/h was 1.46 seconds, a figure significantly better than Tesla boasts in the Model S Plaid (2.1 seconds, realistically: ~2.3-2.4 seconds). The current result, reaching 100 km/h after just 0.956 seconds, is an excellent result when we are talking about a wheeled vehicle without additional jet engines. Mythen was powered by four electric motors, one inside each wheel, which were able to achieve a total of 240 kW of power.
It’s easy to calculate that achieving 100 km/h over a distance of 12.3 meters means that the overload in the car was 2.74 g, 2.74 times the earth’s acceleration. The human body doesn’t have much trouble with it, if it doesn’t last too long, similar overloads happen on large queues in amusement parks. Unfortunately, the capacity of the battery in the press release was not given, we guess that it was minimal, so that only the car would manage to drive those few tens of meters.
