Students at the Technical University of Munich in Germany have built an incredibly efficient electric car that’s absolutely crushed the previous record for the longest distance driven on a single battery charge.
The vehicle covered just short of 1,600 miles on just a single charge of 15.5 kilowatt hours, officially setting a new Guinness World Record.
To put those numbers into perspective, per Car and Driver, the longest-range production car is the 2023 Lucid Air, which has an EPA-estimated range of 516 miles, thanks to a 118 kilowatt-hour battery.
The previous record of 999 miles was set by global tech company IT Asset Partners back in 2017.
The students’ record-beating EV took its time to cover the 1,600 miles. Specifically, the single-seater took 99 hours of driving around inside an airplane hangar near the Munich airport, traveling at a max speed of just 26 mph — essentially the opposite approach of the jaw-dropping mini racer that recently accomplished acceleration of 0 to 62 mph in a blistering 0.956 seconds.
Unsurprisingly, the wedge-shaped vehicle was designed primarily to keep weight and air resistance to a bare minimum. The vehicle has a drag coefficient of just 0.159. For perspective, Lightyear claims its Lightyear 0 production-ready solar car is the most aerodynamic production car with a drag coefficient of 0.175.
However, the muc022’s curb weight of just 375 pounds suggests that its driver likely had access to an absolute minimum of luxuries.
But then again, blasting the AC or listening to music isn’t exactly the goal of the exercise.
Credit : the_byte..