TFL made it to Fairbanks

[ldavenci]

But your statement isn't true - I can and have used on-site tools to get my motorcycle across the Darien gap. And it made every mile of the PanAm Highway from Alaska to Argentina under its own power using fuel purchased along the way. The gap had to be transited - much as there are bridges and ferries on many roads - one time I flew across on a scheduled flight (the second time because we were in a group of seven riders) the other time hoisted the motorcycle onto a small (42') chartered sailboat and stopped in the San Blas Islands for a couple days, then sailed to Cartagena (Northeast of Panama City) and used the boom to put it ashore to continue. I never took another vehicle along on my trip to make the trip possible in the first vehicle. That is why this is a fail. Put another way, the trip would have been possible entirely with only the "support" vehicle and not using the Lightning at all. The Lightning was just a sideshow holding everything else back.

I can appreciate you questioning if the trip was 'legit' or not (standard?), but be fair as you are using your own experiences as the gauge of success and reasoning to call it a stunt.

1. Would the trip have been considered a success if TFL happened to have a charger conveniently in play every time they needed one, or a bank of deployable solar chargers to self-charge? Or would that fall into the category of cheating because they couldn't do it with their own power reserves? No vehicle can do that...gas, electric, or human-powered because they all need refueling sometime, somehow.

2. To call it a stunt or sideshow is disingenuous because you are using your experiences as the high bar. It would not be fair for an RV driver to say your efforts were not valid because you had to purchase shady gas from small villages vs. having the room on your motorcycle to take you to the next waypoint like an RV. You did what you had to do to make it to your goal. They did the same thing. Yes, they took a ferry, but again that was part of their planning...no different than you taking a plane to your destinations, as a part of your planning. Different strategies, same goals.

I follow (not run ) marathon performances and was amazed how many people discredited Eliud Kipchoge in the Ineos Challenge as the first man to run a sub 2hr marathon because of how it was paced and fluids. I look at it as, did he run with his feet? Did he run marathon distance? Works for me!

Your trips sound amazing and would love a separate thread or link to them all to learn about your accomplishments...but please be fair because it's not what you would do making it's a stunt. Was it for the viewers, of course. And we enjoyed it. Just be fair.

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[personalt]

Yeah, you could probably get to Fairbanks, painfully. But you could not make it to Deadhorse. There is no electrical power on the gravel/dirt Dalton Highway, 495 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, except at Coldfoot camp, which is provided by local generator source. The first leg is 253 miles. Each leg includes mountain passes and it is almost entirely unpaved. No way you could make either leg even in a totally empty Lightning with no passengers, assuming you could find a way to charge at Coldfoot camp.

When motorcycling that road we have to strategize fueling for bikes with smaller tanks. I ride a bike with a 7.4 gallon tank, so can make it, but have ridden with others who only have 200 mile range, and we carry supplement fuel cans.

Those of us who live in the US or EU have a fantasy view of travel. Having motorcycled the world and purchased illegal Jerry can gas from shady guys in mud road Ugandan villages standing at a shuttered gas station, closed due to both fuel outage and no electricity, with similar experiences in Mongolia, Siberia, the Andes, rural China and even New Zealand and Eastern Europe, it is safe to say it will be a VERY long time before EV travel is ubiquitous. The vast majority of the world’s roads remain unpaved, and half the people in China have never flushed a toilet in their lives.

Our infrastructure is only a dream elsewhere. My wife and I are flying in September to meet our motorcycle in Antofagasta, Chile for a two-month ride through Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, going places on unpaved roads where trying to use an EV will be impossible for the foreseeable future. I love EV driving, but expect to have ICE vehicles for the rest of our lives, especially for adventure travel. We just returned last week from two months riding from Heidelberg, where we store a motorcycle, to a ferry to England, another ferry to the Shetlands, another ferry to the Orkneys, another to Scotland, where we rode Skye and most of Scotland and the UK’s National parks. We saw lots of EVs in England, but for most of the 4,700 miles we rode on the motorcycle, much on one-lane sheep paths, an EV would have been nearly impossible, and will remain so - even though we stayed at inns or b&bs every night, and rode fairly short distances each day compared to our norm - and that’s arguably the first world, included a stop in London near the end to see Hamilton for our 45th anniversary. Just the escape day from London to my sister’s place in Strasbourg France via the Folkestone Chunnel train would have been a logistics and speed-limited impossibility, but completely reasonable on BMW motorcycle using the autobahn’s high speed opportunities, which destroy range in an EV.

The life you live is a dream for the rest of us and not most people's normal use case. Really cool being able to travel that much and see all those cool places. EVs (like most products) are all about incremental improvements. EVs not being able to do it all is okay

 

[2wheeltraveler]

I think it's valuable to show the challenges along with the victories... and I like that they've been transparent about all of it. I HOPE this helps someone out there be more informed and think through a situation completely before finding themselves in a bad predicament that could harm them or others!

I have my first towing trip planned and it's in the middle of nowhere TX in December and I'm running math 100 different ways to make sure we don't get stranded... also paying VERY close attention to my actual range with my actual truck to make proper adjustments to the expectations. I'm looking at max 100 miles of range to avoid issues and while not impossible, it definitely required some thought to make it work out on paper.

Of course, this would all be easier if I still had my ICE truck, but this truck is FAR superior to that one in every way and is just downright FUN to drive, so I don't mind playing the game a bit until the battery tech catches up...

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