Think electric cars are slow? Think again. Two brothers in the UK have just set the new world record on the drag strip for the first electric car to crack the 10-second-barrier down the quarter mile. Sam and Olly Young did it in a custom-built Volkswagen Beetle known as ‘Black Current’ which runs purely on batteries.

Sponsored by their local pub, the two men set out to build the project using nothing more than a 1965 Beetle and an old milk float (electric milk truck, similar to a golf kart). The pair have been building electric cars now for the past eight years, and want to see how far the technology can be pushed.

With this latest project, which they’ve appropriately named ‘Black Current’, achieved a new record at an Alternative Energy Racing tournament in Santa Pod, where it posted a 9.51-second quarter mile time. The car also managed to cross the line at 217km/h and achieve 0-96km/h in just 1.6 seconds in the process. Olly said in a recent The Nation report,

“You can’t imagine how fast it is…nought to sixty in 1.6 seconds is pretty hard to explain. It felt absolutely awesome.”

The car uses 60 12-volt motorbike batteries which provide power to a milk-truck-based electric motor. The guys say they could get the Beetle going even faster if they used a lithium gel battery pack instead of the 60 motorbike batteries – which are about one third of the size of a small car battery.

Watch the video below of one of the passes as the car eerily takes off in silence.