Students smash EV world record by building car that goes 1,600 miles on just one charge
Range anxiety could be a thing of the past for electric vehicle owners if this amazing experiment is anything to go by.
Last year, students on the TUfast Eco Team from the Technical University of Munich successfully managed to create the most efficient non-solar electric car ever.
When testing it, they got over a staggering 2,573 kilometers (1,599 miles) of range.
Advert
That's enough to drive more than halfway across the United States on a single charge, and it absolutely obliterated a previous record, earning a new Guinness World Record.
The car is called the 'muc022', and it's really tiny - a single-seater that keeps its weight to the absolute minimum in the quest for efficiency, weighing just 170kg without a driver.
It consumes only 0.6 kilowatt hours to drive 100km - which the university says compares to extremely economical vehicles, which run at around 13kWh per 100km.
It also helps that the muc022 is hugely aerodynamic - it's shaped almost like an arrowhead to reduce drag.
That said, the huge mileage it racked up wasn't accomplished on open roads, where traffic or weather conditions could affect things massively. Rather, the car was tested in a massive airplane hangar, where it could avoid wind and external factors.
Given that it took 99 hours to drain the battery, you can imagine how much dedication it took from the student team, which basically had to run it like a much longer version of the 24-Hours of Le Mans, with shifts driving and sleeping.
The team issued a statement after their successful test, saying: "Countless hours of work in addition to our studies went into preparing for the record. This makes us all the more happy that we now hold the world record. The muc022 had already succeeded in several competitions, and now this is the crowning achievement."
They're well entitled to that pride, too - while we might not see a car like this on the road any time soon, the project could have a massive impact.
It might be able to lead to breakthroughs in our implementation of battery tech, along with proving principles that have only been seen on paper so far, so it could well eventually lead to more efficient cars that run for a lot longer.
And given the ever-increasing popularity of electric vehicles, as seen by the headline-grabbing Tesla Cybertruck, that can only be a good thing. Perhaps, in a couple of decades, we'll look back at people refusing to buy EVs because they're worried about range, and wonder just what they were thinking.