grimsel Sets Electric Vehicle Acceleration Record

By MathWorks Staff

Formula Student is the world’s biggest competition for student engineers, with over 600 teams competing in events including vehicle design, endurance, and acceleration. When the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) entered Formula Student last year, they decided to attempt the acceleration record as well. AMZ team leader Leiv Andresen tells their story.

MEET grimsel

grimsel features a carbon fiber chassis, 4 electrical wheelhub motors yielding a peak power of 200 HP, and individual traction control on each wheel.
PREPPING grimsel FOR THE TRACK

To save weight, we removed parts of the cooling system and the rear wing. Simulink^® simulations helped us decide which components to keep. We analyzed lots of data in MATLAB^® to validate our setup changes.
WORLD RECORD DAY

We made the run several times, adjusting the traction control algorithms in Simulink between runs. Four team members were constantly working on data analysis, mainly in MATLAB.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

0–60 miles per hour in 1.513 seconds! Once we’d grasped the significance of that result, the awesome feeling that we’d broken the world record set in.
BUT THE STORY DOESN’T END HERE

Since that record-breaking run we’ve continued to compete in races all across Europe.
... And meet flüela, our first fully autonomous racecar.