GENEVA, Switzerland -- From zero to 100 km/h in less than a second: a racing car built by students has broken the world record for electric vehicle acceleration, a Swiss university said Tuesday.

Students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences designed and built the "Mythen" vehicle that achieved the feat, ETHZ said in a statement.

"Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that Mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles," it said.

Covering a distance of 12.3 metres (40.4 feet) at the Switzerland Innovation Park in Duebendorf, opposite the students' workshop, the car was powered from zero to 100 kilometres an hour (zero to 62.15 miles per hour) in 0.956 seconds.

"This beats the previous world record of 1.461 seconds, set in September 2022 by a team from the University of Stuttgart by more than a third," ETHZ said.

According to the statement, around 30 student members of the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) had spent the better part of a year on the project.

All the components, "from the printed circuit boards (PCBs) to chassis and the battery, were developed by the students themselves and optimised for their function", it said.

The vehicle weighs just 140 kilogrammes (309 pounds) and boasts 240 kilowatts of power, or around 326 horsepower.

The vehicle's driver was named as Kate Maggetti, a friend of students involved in the project, who was "selected due to her light body weight" and "willingness to take on the challenge", Yann Bernard, head of motor at AMZ, told AFP.

"Working on the project in addition to my studies was very intense," Bernard added in the statement.

"But even so, it was a lot of fun working with other students to continually produce new solutions and put into practice what we learned in class," he said.

"And, of course, it is an absolutely unique experience to be involved in a world record."