What 0-62mph In Under One Second Looks Like

Acceleration has always been a more real-world relevant measure of speed than top speed, because let’s face it, where can you do 250mph, even if you did have a car capable of it?

So anything that pushes the boundaries of acceleration is right up our street. A big round of applause, then, to a bunch of Swiss students who have created a car that will go from a standstill to 62mph in a World Record 0.956 seconds. (Just for comparison, the Rimac Nevera takes twice as long.)

The car was built by students from the Academic Sports Club Zurich (ATZ), made up of members from ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. They called the car ‘Mythen’, and it’s a super lightweight single-seater made from carbon and aluminium honeycomb, weighing just 140kg. Power comes from four electric motors, one on each wheel hub, which gives it 322bhp.

By our calculations, that works out at around 2300bhp per tonne, which is frankly insane. For some perspective, the Lotus Evija pumps out around 1173bhp/tonne, and the McMurtry Speirling rocks the round 1000bhp/tonne. So the Mythen, while it’s obviously built for one job and one job only, has twice the effective power of those monsters.

Of course, having all that power is no good unless you can get it onto the road. So how does the Mythen avoid instantly shredding its tyres and going nowhere? Well, it sucks. The details from the team are vague, but it sounds like there’s a vacuum function under the car that sucks it to the ground (not unlike the McMurtry, by the sounds of it).

It's taken a year of testing and building for the record to be achieved, using components developed by the students themselves. The magic figure of 0.956 seconds was set over a distance of just 12.3 metres by driver Kate Maggetti on a patch of ground right outside the student’s workshop.

We could carry on writing examples of how such monumental acceleration looks and sounds, but look, just watch the video. And remember, it’s not sped up.