An electric racing car built by Swiss student engineers has broken the world record for acceleration by battery-powered vehicles.

The grimsel car took only 1.513 seconds to reach 100kph - slashing about a quarter of a second off the previous record time.

So far, no petrol-powered production car has managed to hit the same speed in a comparable time.

The grimsel needed only 30m of track to reach the landmark speed.

The previous record of 0-100kph in 1.779 seconds was set by a team from the University of Stuttgart last year.

By comparison, the fastest production vehicle, the Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid, takes 2.2 seconds to reach the same speed.

Read more at BBC.