0-100 in less than a second. And I'm driving

Zero to a hundred kilometres per hour is the standard test for how fast a car accelerates. The Brits call it nought to sixty miles an hour. An everyday road car with a bit of power can do that in six or seven seconds. A Formula One car, about two seconds. As I record this, the fastest accelerating road-legal car in the world is the Rimac Nivera, which can go from zero to a hundred kilometres per hour in 1.85 seconds. This is Mutant, built by a team from ETH Zurich, a Swiss university. And it hits a hundred kilometres per hour in under a second. This car is the current holder of the world record in acceleration from zero to a hundred kilometres per hour for electric vehicles. For the world record project, we brought together a team of alumni and current team members. Some are students, some are recent graduates. We took a car that was fully designed by students, we modified it. That also allowed some of the members that are still students to do research and make master theses. And I'm about to get in it and do that. But there is quite a history of floppy-haired British presenters getting into high-speed vehicles and ending up in hospital. So I've got a lot of safety briefing to do first. To build a car that can go this fast, you really need to go down to the first principles of physics. You need to be able to put enough force into the ground in a very short amount of time. Just pure grip reaches its limits at around one and a half seconds approximately. To get more force into the ground, we use a self-developed system which we call power ground effect. We suck the air out underneath the car from a big plate and this pulls the car to the ground to make the car accelerate faster. We use two fans that power up shortly before launch to pull the car down to be able to create that under pressure. However, for the back wheels, we need more torque. So for this, we developed a new generation of motors that has approximately twice the amount of torque. Each of the motors has approximately the same power as a small hatchback. Everything is custom, self-designed, so it's quite expensive. The main source of parts is from our sponsors from the industry. We also get a lot of support from the university. Our mission is not to build race cars, it is to build up engineers. At world record pace, a lightweight driver in here pulls 3.8 G's peak acceleration. I'm going to add about 30 more kilos of weight, so I'm not going to quite hit that pace, but it's going to be close. It's almost as fast as the catapult that launches fighter jets from aircraft carriers. It's faster than any roller coaster launch, apart from one in Japan that's currently closed because it kept shattering people's bones. There are cars which take off faster than Mitten here, but they're top fuel dragsters running on nitromethane, loud enough to cause hearing damage and not suitable for anything other than going in a straight line for a few seconds. And yes, I will just be going in a straight line for a few seconds, but in theory, I could go around an actual racetrack. Electrically, the main danger is high voltage. There are emergency buttons, push that button to turn off the car. If there is, for example, a fire in the car, the driver has to be able to get out quickly. It's something you have to train just to be quick enough. That was 6.6. You have to be able to exit the car within five seconds. Clear. 4.6. That'll do. It's absolutely difficult to describe because it's only a second. It's a really surreal experience because you don't really believe it just happened. You go into acceleration mode, roll to the start, initiate power ground effect, which will suck you to the floor. PG active. Oh boy. You will have to pull on the buttons behind the steering wheel and then push throttle. And then when you release, there is a split second where nothing happens, but then you will get launched. Throttle. Holy... After you have reached 100 kmh, the car will shut down and then you can slowly go on the brakes. What? That was the longest second of my life. I... was that really only like one and a bit seconds? That felt like five. That felt like five seconds. I'm pretty much dead on 1.4 seconds. 1.4. I mean, it's your round of applause, folks. Congratulations. That's a heck of a thing.