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Racing Green Endurance team completes its 16,000 mile, electric Pan-American trip (video)
Hey, remember the crazy Imperial College kids in the Racing Green Endurance team, the ones who took a perfectly wonderful Radical racer and stripped it of its internal-combustion assets, flew it to Alaska, and then pledged to drive it all the way down the Pan-American Highway? Well, they made it. 26,000km later (that's 16,155 miles) the team has reached Ushuaia, Argentina, at the southern tip of South America and a long, long way from Anchorage. Traveling an average of 300km (186 miles) per day the team conquered desert, jungle, and torrential rain storms, conditions the purely electric and decidedly track-focused machine certainly wasn't meant for, but proving that an EV can be driven way beyond its maximum range -- if you don't mind taking nearly six months to do it. [Thanks, Amanda]
Racing Green Endurance SRZero electric car to make 16,000 mile trip, 250 at a time
Want to show that electric cars can be practical in day-to-day living? Take one on an impossibly long trip and show the world. That's the plan for the Racing Green Endurance team, centered at Imperial College London, which will be taking its SRZero electric car along 26,000km (16,000 miles) of the Pan-American Highway, starting in northern Alaska and driving all the way down to Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America. Their car is a repurposed Radical SR8, once a back-breakingly quick two-seat prototype with a curb weight of just 1,433lbs and a rollicking 363 V8 in the back. That lump has been displaced by a pair of Axial Flux electric motors, producing a combined peak of 386hp, though their batteries conspire to nearly double the car's initial weight to 2,600lbs. Still, a 248 mile range is predicted on the EPA cycle, and since you can eke out 300 in a Tesla Roadster (224 mile EPA-rated range), 350 might just be possible here. We'll find out in July, when the trip begins. Early video after the break, filmed by Claudio von Planta of Long Way Round fame, and we threw in footage of the SR8 setting the Nurburgring production car record just for kicks.
