Driving the length of Britain is an expensive test of endurance that isn’t too kind to the environment, but this week I helped do it for free, minus the emissions.
A standard Renault 4, the kind of car parked on any suburban street, has covered the roughly 870 miles from Land’s End to John o’Groats without taking a single unit off the grid or burning a drop of petrol. Every electron came from the sun. The same journey in a petrol car costs £120.48 in fuel (about $160 / AU$230), or £240 return (about $320 / AU$460), while Renault’s bill was nothing.
This was the ‘Easee Sun Run’, a bid to drive a standard production electric car across the length of the country on solar power alone for the first time. The car was £27,000 (approx $36,190 / AU$52,150) Renault 4 E-Tech ‘Plein Sud’ — French for ‘Due South’, and a little joke as it had to be driven very north. You can order one now, even though it doesn’t have its own solar panels, a fact that amazed onlookers all the way up.
The charger is one Easy smart charger you can fit at home, while this particular Renault also had a secret weapon. In the trunk was a 300kWh battery pack built by OnBio from second-life cells, the kind pulled from EVs that were damaged before they ever reached a paddock. Think of it as an oversized power bank for devices thirstier than a smartphone.
Here comes the sun
Power Logistics, a company that usually keeps the lights on at festivals and ‘Trooping the Colour’, spent a week charging it from a solar farm before off. “All the energy we use is free,” its director of operations Ian Peniston told me. “It’s from the sun.” Charged, the pack holds enough to refill the little Renault six times.
The man who dreamed up the record attempt is Jeremy Hart, an automotive adventurer who has driven a Land Rover to China, crossed America on land for sport and installed the world’s most remote public charger on St. Helena.
The idea arose after being in the Canadian Arctic, where he charged an electric car at minus 40C. If solar energy worked there, he reasoned, could it work here with the infrastructure we already have? The hard part was never the driving. It was finding solar farms that could promise that the power entering the car was from the sun and nothing else, rather than the usual mix that flows from any place connected to the grid.
The route served as a trip to British Solar at work. It started in Cornwall at Roskilly’s, an organic farm and ice cream parlor that runs on 316kW panels and sent the car off with a tub of disposable “Easee peasy lemon squeezy” in the back. In Somerset, the convoy called JB Wheaton & Sons, a trucking firm that set up Britain’s first commercial solar farm back in 2011, a 3.3MW array it built not to sell power but to wean its own trucks and make a 38,000-litre fortnightly diesel delivery.
Whaley Bridge Cricket Club in the Peak District has been running its bar and floodlights on 12kW roof panels since 2021, solely powered by solar power. County Durham introduced Power Roll, which prints flexible, crisp-pack-thin solar film off a roll, light enough for the millions of roofs that can’t support the weight of glass and silicon.
The solar system
A few miles from Power Roll, Durham University’s student team rolled out the eighth generation of its solar racing car, four square meters of panels feeding a motor that drinks 900W, about half the size of a hair dryer.
Give it the stored charge that Renault used to reach John o’Groats and, by the team’s reckoning, the little racer would go almost round the world. “We are a nation of inventors,” Hart said. “The World Wide Web is ours, the jet engine was British. What happens quite often is that these innovations are picked up by other countries and commercialized.” Solar, designed and printed in the UK, is the part he wants to keep here.
Keen to take in some of the glory, I joined the final leg, Inverness up to the famous signpost at John o’Groats, and took my turn at the wheel. The map was simple. Eco mode, stick to the limit, drive as you would on the school run. On a red-warned heat wave day, air conditioning running and four grown men on board, the Renault did not grumble. We sat at a constant range of 243 miles in the real world, roughly what Renault is quoting, while the team averaged around 200 throughout.
Hart, who has covered the planet looking for motoring challenges, had strangely never driven his own country from top to bottom. “You know what a beautiful place Britain is,” he said. “It’s only a thousand kilometers long, but there are some fantastic roads. And if you can enjoy them in an electric car, that’s good, because otherwise you throw away all the joy of driving.”
Awesome Scott!
The journey sprung an absurdity. A cattle grid being replaced in Yorkshire sent the team 25 miles off the road, a reasonable detour to go around a pothole.
Scotland’s east coast, meanwhile, was drenched in sun, and somewhere along it we even came across a sheep with its head stuck in a fence. We stopped, got it loose and watched it trot back to two lambs who started eating as if nothing had happened. At John o’Groats, the welcome was a bunch of confused tourists, some from as far as Hong Kong, and a Czech motorcycle gang, most of them on Harleys, who couldn’t quite understand what the car had just done.
The entire run needed about six full charges of four hours each, so call it 24 hours of charging against the 16 hours of driving the route takes. During the entire drive, the car drew 276 kWh, every unit of that solar energy. The panels collected 555kWh along the way, almost double what the car used, so there was sun in hand to have turned around at John o’Groats and driven all the way back to Lands End.
Gaps are also created by charge speed, not range. Renault accepts a constant 11kW, but it falls short of what the Easee’s three-phase charger could push. Do this on a public network, Hart says, and you’d gain most of that time back. He proved it at the end by plugging into a 50kW public charger, going for fish and chips and returning to a full battery.
To keep the record clean, the team set themselves a rule. They had to arrive with at least as much charge as they held when they took their first top-up, so no one could claim that a bit of mains power had crept in before the start. That figure was 20 per cent. We rolled into John o’Groats with 28.
On the first morning in Cornwall, sea fog sat on the Lizard Peninsula, the panels barely touched and the entire departure hung in the balance until the sun burned through. You feel your dependence on the light when there is no tank to fall back on. The same route in a small gasoline car would have put about 78 kg of CO2 into the air, more in total. The Sun Run produced nothing worth counting.
What stuck with me as I drove through the endlessly spectacular highlands of Scotland was how many homes had solar panels on their roofs. If technology serves its team in a country that spends half of its winter in darkness, it serves it everywhere. Although just as well, the record attempt was purposely scheduled to take place on the summer solstice to maximize daylight.
Electric sensation
Gareth Simkins of the trade association Solar Energy UK puts the wider picture into perspective: on an April afternoon this year, solar power was covering 46 per cent of Britain’s electricity demand. A pyramid-shaped office in Edinburgh, visited earlier in the run, generates enough each year to send this Renault end-to-end 135 times.
“Electric vehicles and solar power were made for each other,” says Easee CEO Anthony Fernandez. “I think this journey proves exactly that.” His head of innovation, Kjetil Næsje, believes that the challenge is to make them “talk to each other better”, so that the power that reaches your car is the power you choose.
Full disclosure, you can’t yet pull into a solar farm and fill your boots, and Hart is the first to say so. “It’s not really publicly possible to do what we’ve done yet,” he told me. “But everyone wanted this to work, and I didn’t meet a single person who said, ‘This is a bad thing.'” Fit your own panels and a home battery and you’re within reach of charging an electric car in the sunshine alone.
The race also arrives as the UK government looks to legalize plug-in solar cell set that the Germans have been hanging from their balconies for years, making your pursuit of the sun a little easier.
A nice symmetry awaited in the finish. The car reached John o’Groats on the night Scotland faced Brazil at the World Cup, and the village’s 8 Doors distillery had marked the same event with a limited edition 28-year-old single malt, Seven Sons “Spirit of Brazil”, drawn from a cask filled in 1998 when the parties last met. It retails for £240 (approx $320 / AU$460), the same as the petrol we didn’t buy. A suitable prize, collected in person.
Hart has driven to China and across America and feels no need to repeat either. He assesses this differently. To cross the whole country without paying a penny to move the car, he said, “is crazy”. Hard to argue, standing at the top of Britain with a full battery, a bottle of whiskey and nothing on the fuel receipt.
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