Name: Is this the future of electric racing? | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-09-26T13:47:01.000Z
Duration: 6 min 29 s
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This is Formula Student, a world series of events that took place this summer featuring electric cars built by teams of students from 100 universities across the globe.

Gerund

On tracks throughout Europe, the cars competed in disciplines including autocross, racing through Formula One like twists and turns as fast as possible, an endurance trial through more than 20 kilometres of track to push the limits of battery management, a test of grip and downforce by basically going round in a circle as fast as possible, and then there's acceleration.

Future simple

It's a drag race, basically, and it's this last challenge that one team, AMZ Racing, absolutely blasted last year, going from 0 to 100 kilometres an hour in, well, I'll let you know a bit later.

AMZ includes students from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and ETH Zurich, and I dropped in on the team's Swiss HQ.

And up here is the electronics department at AMZ Racing.

For one car to excel at all of these events, it not only has to have a powerful motor, but also computers have to control the traction and fine-tune the speed of each wheel individually, and somehow it has to stick to the ground to give the tyres more grip.

AMZ achieved this with powerful fans that actually sucked the ultralight vehicle to the tarmac.

Are you building on last year's design, or have you completely reinvented anything?

Every year we design a completely new race car.

I mean, of course, we orient ourselves on the fans we had.

We improved not the same concept, but kind of is based on the same physics behind it.

Is this something you want to do in the future?

Do you want to work on, like, racing cars?

I mean, it'd definitely be fun and really interesting, but I'm not sure yet.

And, yeah, the point of this competition is less about the winning and more about the learning.

Getting to work on such a project during your studies is an incredible knowledge gain.

I mean, if I compare myself three years ago before I joined the association, I knew very little about engineering compared to what I do now.

There are some things that might get adopted in industry.

However, I think the main thing is just to really get those engineers all ready to have some practical experience during their studies.

Now, after last year's Formula Student competition, the team decided to specifically re-engineer the car to try and break the world acceleration record and go from 0 to 100 kilometres an hour in the shortest time for an electric car.

This was the vehicle and the target time.

So, in 2016, ETH held the record 0 to 100 kilometres an hour in?

And then in 2022, Stuttgart came along and did it in?

1.46, so about five hundredths of a second.

And then last year, you came along and did 0 to 100 kilometres an hour in how much?

A bit less than a second. 0.956. 0 to 60 in less than a second.

So, you just feel this push and you can't even blink, it's already over.

Do you have time to do any steering or do you have to hope it's pointing in the right direction?

You have to hope that it points in the right direction, but this we control before every start and there is maybe a little bit of steering, but it's just intuitive.

Now, when I visited AMZ a few weeks before this summer's competition, I got to witness the very first day of testing this year's brand new car.

All our cameras were set to catch the high speed action.

OK, look, this was actually just a test to see if all the computers and sensors were talking to each other.

The fact the car moved at all was considered a success.

But come the Formula Student Tournament itself, AMZ did brilliantly, winning events in Switzerland, Hungary and the biggest one in Germany.

 And equally importantly, the next generation of engineers has done its qualifying lap. you

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Is this the future of electric racing? | BBC News

stick

absolutely

insane

basically