What Car? journos set EV World Record for most countries visited in 24 hours
What Car? journalists Neil Winn and Doug Revolta have set a new world record for the most countries visited in 24 hours in an electric car.
The unmodified Porsche Taycan (Performance Battery Plus) chosen for the challenge required seven charge stops at ultra-rapid 350kW Ionity chargers along the 1199-mile journey across 14 countries.
Aside from these brief charge stops, the pair drove the Taycan non-stop for 24 hours from the Netherlands to Serbia, passing through Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary and Bosnia in that order.
Both drivers faced numerous challenges in their 24-hour driving adventure including rush hour traffic in Luxembourg and a perilous border crossing in Hungary, but this didn’t stop the pair from maintaining a moving average of 61mph. The largest proportion of their time (just over four hours) was spent traversing Croatia as the crescent-shaped country abuts Slovenia, Hungary, Bosnia and Serbia. This contrasts rather starkly with the 10 minutes it took to cross the tiny principality of Liechtenstein.
Calculating average charging times and driving speeds, and adjusting for traffic and border crossings, What Car? had initially estimated to make it as far as 13 countries in the 24-hour period. However, they managed to include Hungary in the final tally – taking the total to 14.
Says Neil Winn, Deputy Reviews Editor for What Car?:
“The European road trip has an electric future. Our epic journey has shown that the rise of electric cars doesn’t mean a mega-mile cross-continental holiday is off the cards.
“I knew before we set off that everything would need to go perfectly for us to achieve the initial goal of travelling through 13 countries in 24 hours. So you can imagine our surprise when we decided to do 14 because we were so far ahead of time.
“We believe this achievement is a world record. It’s impossible to get timed records officially verified on public roads, but during our research we didn’t find any documentation of other electric adventurers who have managed more countries in 24 hours.”
Meanwhile last week EV company ZEEKR announced it had successfully broken two Guinness World Records at an event in China. The premium all-electric 001 vehicle broke the record for the fastest drift ever achieved by an electric car hitting a maximum speed of 207.996km/h. It then went on to take the title for the fastest electric car slalom between 50 equally spaced cones at 49.05 seconds.
