Many of us – too many of us, really – will look at the range of a potential electric car purchase and, slowly sucking air in through our teeth, think: “That’s just not enough for me to feel comfortable.” If that’s the case, try this for a thought experiment. Imagine standing at the North Pole, atop the vast ice sheet north of the Canadian coastline, with the keys to an EV in your hands.
You climb aboard your vehicle, start it up, and commence driving to your destination. Your destination is the South Pole, crossing 16,000km, 14 countries and three continents. Oh, and your car has a maximum range of 250km.
That was precisely the scenario facing Chris and Julie Ramsey, as they set out for an epic Pole-to-Pole drive in a specially modified Nissan Ariya. The trip, which started in March 2023, took ten months to complete, with the husband-and-wife team arriving at the South Pole in December of that year. Now, you have a chance to meet Chris, Julie, and their Nissan Ariya as all three will be attending the Nevo show at the RDS.
For anyone thinking that electric cars can only undertake short journeys, or that they’re rubbish in cold weather, Chris and Julie’s epic adventure should be proof enough of the exact opposite. “Yes, the battery range was impacted”, says Julie Ramsey.
RM Block
“That was a given. But the car always worked, which was my main concern – that the car would just freeze to a point where it would be non-responsive, it would just be a deadweight in the middle of nowhere. But the car worked every time, and it really surprised us, and I think our support team, just how well the car actually coped in those harshest environments.”
Temperatures at both poles dropped as low as -39, even without accounting for the wind chill. Still, the Nissan – riding on its big 39-inch BF Goodrich tyres and modified suspension – ploughed on even as the ice began to melt, thanks to the warmer-than-expected conditions caused by the very global warming that electric cars are at least a partial solution to. The team even had to rush as the famous Ice Road south across the tundra was going to close earlier than expected, leaving no room for error.
Which was precisely when the car broke. Not through any fault in the battery nor the electrical system, but because Chris drove it too hard. “We sheared the inner steering rod on the left-hand side of the drive side [of] the car, just from just a rock being hidden under the snow,” said Chris. “I was launching the car through deep snow, and we came crashing down with suspension compression and basically just sheared the inner steering rod. And it was like get everyone out, get the car jacked up and start pulling the tire off, replacing this component in like, -35 degree conditions to allow it to continue. And this is all while we’re told: ‘You’ve got no time. You can’t stop, you’ve got to keep moving, or else you’re going to miss the ice road closure’.”
They made it, just, radioing back messages to their support crew from Arctic Trucks (the famed Icelandic adventure vehicle builders) to avoid parts of the road that run across frozen Canadian lakes that had melted enough to allow the Nissan Ariya to dig its own potholes as it went.
There’s an almost ridiculous contrast between the frozen North and South Poles, and the warm, humid countries of Central and South America, but that was precisely the point – to prove that an EV could work happily in all conditions. In fact, one of the biggest issues to deal with was not the terrain, but the different US Nacs charging connector, which needed an adaptor to work with the European-spec Nissan, and as it happened not all charging points were happy to work with an adaptor.
With a relatively truncated range – those big wheels and tyres, and the roof-tent sapped some of the Ariya’s usual 500km+ range – the Ramseys’ intrepidity had to run as far as occasionally knocking on doors and asking to use someone’s domestic socket.
“The way I see it is, if there’s a building that can power a light bulb, it can power your car,” said Julie. “Yes, it just takes a little bit longer. But then that’s where you take the opportunity to connect with the local people and speak to them, spend time with them, check out the local towns and cities wherever you are, and just use that to your advantage, because it’s an adventure, after all, and what’s an adventure without meeting, experiencing local culture, meeting the local people? So yeah, that’s our philosophy and our mindset when we come to do these kinds of extreme adventures.”
Equally, where there was no charging network before, Chris and Julie used the publicity surrounding their adventure to help establish one.
“We worked with a company called Enel X Way to build and identify all the stops along the way from the northern border of Peru, all the way to the southern tip of Chile. And we built, working with Enel X, we built a charging network. Well, I say ‘we’ – they built a charging network all that way, every 150 miles there was a charger. There was the odd gap, and that’s when we got creative and met the locals. But they built that charging network, so now there is an AC and DC charging network from the northern border of Peru all the way down the southern tip of Chile, thanks to our expedition.”
The trip scored the Ramseys’ two Guinness World Records – First expedition by an electric car from the Magnetic North Pole to the South Pole and Longest journey by an electric car in Antarctica. Those have been added to other world records held by the duo, including one for covering the greatest distance on an e-bike in 24 hours (286km if you’re wondering). That’s to say nothing of competing in the 16,000km Mongol Rally in a first-generation Nissan Leaf, or driving an early BMW i3 from Edinburgh to Monte Carlo and back in just 60 hours.
The whole idea behind this, of course, is to convince others to make the leap to electric power, and it appears to be working. Anecdote isn’t necessarily evidence, of course, but Julie tells of a family who visited them on the stand at the recent Car Fest event in the UK: “This lovely family who was there the year before and saw our expedition car, came back and said: ‘Guess what? We’ve bought a Nissan Ariya, and we’ve driven a lot of different cars, but we fell in love with [your] scenario, and we just want to thank you for sharing your story.’ So that’s a direct impact on someone’s decision-making, on switching to EV. And so yeah, we were very moved and very happy.
“It’s hard to measure, because not everybody gets in contact with us to say, ‘Oh, we’ve bought an EV because of you,’ but we’d like to hope that, indirectly, we’ve inspired a lot of people to consider it, and hopefully these exciting and bold stories just brings it to their attention, maybe some of the concerns they had we can help alleviate or say it’s actually okay; if we can do something this extreme, then surely it’s more capable for your everyday needs.”
