Formula Student's Grimsel Electric Race Car Breaks 0 to 60 Acceleration World Record In A Neck-Snapping 1.5 Seconds

Students at ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts took to the fast lane and developed an electric vehicle that's capable of going 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in just 1.513 seconds. Here in the U.S. where we stubbornly shun the metric system, that's roughly equivalent to a 0 to 60 miles per hour measurement (62.1371 MPH to be exact). More importantly, the students can celebrate setting a world record in acceleration for an electric car.

Hitting 100 km/h in just 1.513 seconds took just 30 meters of track at the Dübendorf air base near Zurich. Previously the world record sat at 1.779 seconds, which was achieved by a team assembled at the University of Stuffgart. Talk about having fun at school—this is far and away more thrilling than anything I studied in college.


It took less than a year for a group of 30 students to build the Grimsel. Part of the reason it accelerates so quickly is because of its lightweight construction. The students used carbon fiber materials to build Grimsel, resulting in an electrical vehicle that weighs just 168 kilograms, or a little over 370 pounds.

Grimsel is a four-wheel drive electric racing car with four specially developed wheel hub motors capable of generating 200 HP and 1,700 Nm (1,202 pounds per foot) of torque. It also has an advanced traction control system that regulates the performance of wheel individually, which also helps it accelerate faster. There's no large-scale production car on the market that can accelerate as quickly as the Grimsel, even in the combustion engine world.