Watch This College-Made Electric Car Blast from 0 to 60 in 1.5 Seconds

They’ve gone to plaid!

byWill Sabel Courtney|
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This tiny electric car whipped up by a group of Swiss students may be cute, but it can lay down some seriously aggressive acceleration. The eco-friendly vehicle smashed into the record books with a world electric vehicle record 0 to 100 kph time of 1.513 seconds, hitting 60 mph within 100 feet along the way.

The car—known as "grimsel," which translates into English as "grimsel"—was put together by students from Switzerland's ETH Zurich and Hochschule Luzern universities as part of the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich, or AMZ, project. Much like its fellow accelerative electric marvel the Tesla Model S P 90D,Grimsel routes its power to the ground through all four wheels; unlike Elon Musk's luxury sedan-slash-rolling Spaceballs homage, it's made largely from carbon fiber, in order to save weight.

That 1.5 second 0 to 60 run means Grimsel is not only faster than any Ludicrous Mode-equipped Tesla, it also does that sprint more quickly than, well, every other production car on the road. The Porsche 911 Turbo S? Toast. The 918 Spyder? Can't touch it. The McLaren P1, the Ferrari LaFerrari, the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport? All would be left sucking Grimsel's exhaust, if there were any exhaust other than a stream of German curse words.

The AMZ project car was created for Formula Student, a competition in which students from around the globe compete to build one-off prototype vehicles, then pit them head to head in challenges from on-track performance to design discussions.

You can skip ahead to 2:51 if you want to jump right to the Veyron-roasting launch, but if you can spare the three-plus minutes to watch the whole video, do so. The Swiss whiz kids went to an awful lot of trouble to try and make the little film amusing, and they did a pretty good job...in that straight-laced, Germanic way.

And if you just can't get enough of these goofy Swiss science geeks and their stupidly quick car, you can learn more about them in the videos below.

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