The fastest 0 to 62 mph EV isn't what you think

The race to reach 60 mph or 62 mph from a standing start as quickly as possible has long stepped into the ridiculous territory. You know how you know? If we're measuring things in hundredths of a second. Even tens of a second seems arduous at best, since most people can't really 'tell', say, 8.1s from 8.2s, but when we get to 1.85s, we've reached the realm of car makers enjoying as much free publicity as they can.

So far, the fastest production EV has been the Rimac Nevera, timed at 1.81s to go from 0 to 62 mph, eeking past the Pininfarina Battista by a whopping 0.5s. But what if we could get past all that and go under one second? Insane, right? Well, not exactly. A group of students at ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, both in Switzerland, have broken the record.

Their purpose-built EV called mythen did zero to 62 mph in just 0.956 seconds over a distance of 484.3 inches. This is obviously mind-blowing, but can we just point out that we're into thousandths of a second territory right now? At this rate, the next record will be something like 0.9521 seconds.

Anyway, that doesn't take away from the achievement of these students, who spent the better part of a year working on the mythen during every spare minute they had. Guinness World Records has confirmed that mythen did in fact break the previous acceleration record for EVs, when it did its run on the Switzerland Innovation Park in Duebendorf, directly opposite the students' workshop.

The previous record for not-in-production EVs was 1.461s, achieved back in September of 2022 by a team from the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

All of mythen's components - the chassis, the printed circuit boards, even the battery - were developed by the students themselves. Since they used carbon and aluminum for the build, the car weighs just 309 lb. And if you're wondering about its power output, get ready to be surprised. Thanks to the insanely low weight, it broke the acceleration record while having just 240 kW, or around 326 hp.