Ten engineering students from Britain hope to tackle the Pan-American Highway -- all 15,000 miles of it -- in the last thing you'd think to do it in: an electric car.
Not just any electric car, mind you, but one originally designed for racing.
Racing Green Endurance, which consists entirely of students at Imperial College London, has converted a Radical SR8 to battery electric power. As if that weren't impressive enough, they plan to spend three months driving it from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra Del Fuego to show people that EVs can be quick, they can be cool and they can go the distance.
"The perception still exists that EVs are somehow inferior to their fossil fueled counterparts," team spokesman Andy Hadland told Wired.com. "There is always a caveat. ‘I'd buy one, but they only go a few miles … they aren't really zero carbon … they take too long to charge.' These are all perceptions that we want to change."
