Rainer Zietlow, a professional long-distance driver from Germany, and Derek Collins broke a new Guinness World Record by traveling 97 days 35,770-mile journey across the United States in an electric vehicle. It was announced by Guinness on Wednesday that the trip officially set the world record for the longest journey by electric vehicle in a single country.
Zietlow and Collins said they visited more than 600 Volkswagen dealerships during the trip and made more than 200 stops to charge the vehicle’s battery. “The record not only documents the reliability of the ID.4 but also to the actual readiness status of the charging infrastructure in the U.S.,” Zeitlow, founder of event agency Challenge4, told Guinness.
Zietlow and Collins were supported during their trip by the HARTING Technology Group. “We’re here to prove that an electric vehicle is a decidedly viable solution, whether you’re only driving short distances or off on a road trip across the country. The technology is there. The infrastructure is in place,” said Jon DeSouza, managing director of HARTING Americas.
On the journey, the ID.4 passed a vast range of landscapes including the Rocky Mountains, swamps of Florida, deserts of New Mexico, rainforests of the Pacific North West and areas of Oregon that had been ravaged by wildfires. The 97-day trip took the pair to all 48 of the contiguous states — that’s excluding Alaska and Hawaii— recharging their battery using the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America charging network.
Not the first record
The ID.4 used by the team was unmodified, using the same 77kWh battery pack and dual-motor set-up as a standard car, and with a range of around 250 miles. Though only awarded the one-country record, their journey was also longer than the 18,643-mile electric vehicle record set solely in the United States, using a Tesla Model 3 in 2018. This isn’t the first record-breaking journey for Zietlow. The German driver has had an association with Volkswagen for many years and has made a number of journeys that have seen him enter the record books. He took a Volkswagen Touareg off-roader to an altitude record in the Andes Mountains of Chile in 2005 and in 2007 he completed the first natural gas-powered circumnavigation of the globe as part of a team using a specially converted Volkswagen Caddy van. There have been other records set by Zietlow too, driving Volkswagens from Melbourne, Australia to St Petersburg, Russia, and from the Nordkapp of Norway to the southern tip of Africa.
Credits- Driving.co.uk
