In 885 days to Australia with an electric car
On 15 March 2016, the 29-year-old Wiebe Wakker in Houten stepped into his modified Volkswagen e-Golf to travel to Australia without any money. A project where you can safely ask yourself how great the chance of success is. However, after exactly 885 days Wiebe managed to reach Perth. Unprecedented but true, and that more than 70,000 km (just not 2x the world around).
The main reason for the enormous distance is that Wiebe was completely dependent on the goodwill of people who offered him help. That was no less than 700 from 40 different countries. His journey started well because at the start he had to travel to Scandinavia via Italy and then to Ukraine via Iran. Along the way he was often without money and charging points and he was literally dependent on the local population.
Australia
The Globetrotter needed 827 days to reach the Australian coast after he could park his e-Golf-e in Down Under after Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Wiebe “ to reach Darwin already felt like a good performance. Now that I have reached Perth, I am proud that I can show that one of the world’s most remote cities can also be reached by an electric car “. The aim of Wiebe was to take away the myth that electric vehicles can not provide the same performance as cars running on fossil fuels.
His e-Golf adapted for this trip, the ‘Blue Bandit’, has a range of 200 kilometers on a full battery. Roadhouses, farms and even Aboriginal communities helped him through the final trajectory in Australia, after which he was welcomed in Perth.
Longest distance record broken
Wakker can safely describe himself as an electric pioneer because he was the first person who, among others, traversed Turkey, Iran, India, Malaysia and Indonesia with a fully electric car. He has now broken the current record ‘longest distance in an electric car (non-solar) of 22,000 km.
Plug Me In
The goal Wiebo Wakker with his project ‘Plug Me In’ is to convey knowledge, to inspire and to accelerate the transition to a climate-neutral future. With its ‘Blue Bandit’ and this project, Wakkerbedrijven and initiatives that actively promote sustainability. Via videos on his website plugmeinproject.com he shows what the challenges in the various countries are and what innovative solutions are available according to him.