While electric hypercar manufacturers have taken to breaking things down to the hundredth of a second to distinguish acceleration times around or below the 2-second mark, university teams have dropped things by full tenths down into the mid 1-second area with track-only electric roadsters. In 2016, the Swiss Grimsel set the Guinness World Record for fastest 0-100 km/h electric car acceleration at 1.513 seconds. Now, the GreenTeam from the University of Stuttgart brings the record back to Germany by breaking the 1.5-sec mark.
For a chunk of the early-to-mid 2010's, the 0-100 km/h (62 mph) electric car acceleration record was quite hotly contested, bouncing its way from one European university team to the next on an annual basis, from Germany, to Switzerland, to the Netherlands and back again.
Three years after assembling in 2009, the University of Stuttgart GreenTeam set its first world record at 2.681 seconds in 2012, which was surpassed in 2013 by the Delft University of Technology and again in 2014 with the first sub-2-sec time posted by ETH Zurich/AMZ's Grimsel. The Stuttgart GreenTeam got it back once again in 2015 by edging out the Grimsel's time, only to lose it in 2016 when the Grimsel came back with a 1.513-sec record that's stood for six years.
But no longer. The University of Stuttgart announced on October 6 that its GreenTeam had gone to Bosch's racetrack in Renningen, Germany on September 23 and successfully performed a 1.461-sec 0-100 km/h run. The run was completed in the latest version of the team's self-built open-cockpit racer, the E0711. Guinness recognized the record on October 6, hence the delayed timing of the announcement.
The GreenTeam E0711 may not have a memorable name like "Grimsel," but it's an absolutely formidable machine. The carbon fiber racer runs all four wheels via in-house-developed motors that team up for 180 kW (242 hp) when under power from the new high-voltage battery pack. That output is a fraction of the four-figure horsepower numbers now standard for road-going electric hypercars, but given that the university car weighs a mere 145 kg (320 lb), it beats the elusive 1:1 ratio for a power-to-weight of 1.24 kW/kg, or 1.67 hp/kg.
While GreenTeam certainly developed a capable machine with which to target the official record, it wasn't a smooth, easy path to triumph. The team prepared for the challenge for nearly a full year. A crash in July left the car in need of serious repair (driver was okay), and the initial record attempt in early September had to be postponed to the later date due to technical issues. But things eventually broke GreenTeam's way on September 23, and the car surged to victory.
You can check out world record day in the quick two-minute video.
Source: University of Stuttgart
