Wait, are you sure that’s a record?
Booker, Clarke, and Parker drove an impressive distance on a single charge, but “longest EV drive on a single charge” is a slightly more nebulous thing. In this case, the Polestar 3 was entirely standard, on stock tires. But if you’re prepared to start tweaking stuff around, longer drives are possible.
Last week, Chevrolet revealed that it took one of its Silverado WT trucks—with a gargantuan 205 kWh battery—and then fitted it with worn-down, massively over-inflated tires and drove it around the Detroit area for 1,059 miles (1,704 km). That required a team of 40 drivers, and like the Polestar 3, the average speed was below 25 mph (40 km/h).
Squeezing 4.9 miles/kWh (12.7 kWh/100 km) out of something the size and shape of a full-size pickup is probably more impressive than getting slightly more out of an SUV, but we should note that the Silverado drivers kept the air conditioning turned off until the final 59 miles.
And in July, Lucid announced that it, too, had set a new world record for the longest drive on a single charge. In its case, it took a Lucid Air Grand Touring from St. Moritz in Switzerland to Munich in Germany, covering 749 miles (1,205 km) on a single charge. That’s significantly farther than the Polestar, and the Lucid drivers achieved more than 6 miles/kWh (10.4 kWh/100 km), but the route also involved going mostly downhill.
