Racing Green: electric dreams on America's longest highway

The Pan-American Highway is famous for its extreme terrain. Travelling through 14 different countries, it snakes around freezing mountain passes and dry deserts, pushing the limits of even the most robust of vehicles.

As the longest road in the world, it certainly isn’t somewhere you would expect to see an electric car. But next month, graduates from Imperial College London intend to be the first to travel the 26,000km stretch in an electric vehicle (EV) when they unleash their repurposed Radical SR8 sports car on the highway.

The ambitious drive is part of a project known as Racing Green Endurance (RGE), which began in January last year. Since then, the 11-strong team has adapted the SR8 vehicle to make it roadworthy for the three-month journey from the north of Alaska to the world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia.

’It’ll be a tough trip and not just from a mechanics perspective,’ said Nikolaus Sauer, RGE’s chief mechanical engineer. ’But we’ve done a lot of planning and testing and gained massive support from all over the world… I think we’re about ready to take on the challenge.’