Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

Swiss students break world record with self-built electric car

The record breaking Mythen car
The acceleration record breaking Mythen car. ETH Zürich / Alessandro Della Bella

From 0 to 100km/h in 0.956 seconds: an electric racing car built by students from the federal technology institute ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences has broken the world acceleration record.

The vehicle named “Mythen” achieved the milestone in a distance of 12.3 metres, ETHZ announced on Tuesday.

The previous world record of 1.461 seconds, set by a team from the University of Stuttgart, was bettered by more than a third, according to ETHZ. The record was set at the Dubendorf military airfield in canton Zurich.

The vehicle weighs just 140 kilograms and has an output of 326hp. To prevent the car from taking off when it gets off to a speedy start, the students developed a type of vacuum cleaner that sucks the vehicle to the ground.

The car was designed and built by around 30 students from the Academic Motorsport Association Zurich (AMZ). Following attempts in 2014 and 2016, this is the third time that the AMZ has set the acceleration world record.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

Mark Thomson to become CERN's new General Manager from 2026

More

CERN selects new director-general

This content was published on The CERN Council has chosen British physicist Mark Thomson as the organisation's next director-general.

Read more: CERN selects new director-general

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR