There are two types of people in the world: those who like long-distance trips and those who don’t.
Danish adventurers Hjalte Tin and Nina Tin Rasmussen are most certainly the former. Last week the couple celebrated the completion of the Moto Mundo World Electric Tour - a ten month trip around the world in an all-electric Nissan Qashqai.
Converted by Danish firm AfutureEV from a gasoline Nissan Qashqai, their car was equipped with an 60 kilowatt motor and a 40kilowatt-hour lithium-ion Dow Kokam battery pack.
Capable of a top speed of 80 mph, the converted Qashqai could cover approximately 124 miles per charge and recharged its batteries to 90% in around 6 hours.
Leaving Copenhagen on June 25 2010, the couple drove through Denmark, Norway, sweden, Estonia, Russia, Mongolia, China, The United States, Spain France, Switzerland , Germany, Poland and Holland, covering 18,640 miles in ten months.
Moto-Mundo World Electric Tour Team
The challenge took in several exhibitions en-route, including the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai, the Detroit Motor Show and the Monte Carlo Rally for electric cars, finishing 8th behind the winning 2011 Tesla Roadster.
Unlike the Racing Green Endurance team which completed an all-electric trip along the trans-american highway in November last year, Hjalte Tin and Nina Tin Rasmussen did not have a support team traveling with them, meaning the converted Qashqai was the only form of transport on the trip.
The trip put both car and drivers to the test, with extreme heat in Russian and one of the coldest winters on record in the U.S. The team were also the first to cross the Gobi desert in an all-electric vehicle.
The adventure is already being immortalized in a book and television production about the trip, details of which are expected in the near future.
While the Moto Mundo World Electric Tour may not be the first team to drive an electric-powered car around the world they have taken electric cars into areas of the world where electric cars had never been seen before, helping push the spread message of electric cars far and wide.
[Moto-Mundo.com]
