SHANGHAI to PARIS - 100% ELECTRIC
A HUMAN AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVENTURE OF OVER 14,000 KM IN AN ELECTRIC CAR
After leaving the World Exhibition in Shanghai on May 3rd, the two adventurers Géraldine Gabin and Xavier Chevrin arrived in Paris on July 13th with their Citroën Berlingo "Powered by Venturi". They had spent two-and-a-half months on roads and tracks crossing China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany and finally France.
A HUMAN ADVENTURE
This second mission of the "Venturi Global Challenges" was a fabulous contemporary adventure : nearly 80 years after the magnificent but uncompleted epic of André Citroën's "Croisière Jaune" on the silk route, Venturi symbolically made the return trip using the most modern means of propulsion, from Shanghai to Paris, in an electric vehicle.
Every night, Géraldine and Xavier had to recharge their car and sleep in the homes of local people they met. The two teachers were thus able to make a large number of enriching encounters and share their experience with an electric vehicle which, for the vast majority of people they met, was a real discovery, sometimes seen as truly magical. As Géraldine Gabin explains : “Faces, smiles, hands held out... So many encounters, enabling us to continue on our way and experience the world".
A TECHNOLOGICAL ADVENTURE
A first for a standard electric vehicle, a first for an unassisted vehicle.
On legs ranging from 300 to over 400 km, the Citroën Berlingo "Powered by Venturi" crossed the Gobi desert with its sandstorms, climbed over snow-capped mountain passes at altitudes of over 3,000 meters in the Tian Shan mountain chain, drove along pot-holed roads in Kazakhstan, crossed the Russian steppes and confronted extreme weather conditions.
The journey allowed Venturi to carry out an accelerated and quite extraordinary endurance test. Achieved without any assistance, it is a record in both distance and endurance for a mass-produced electric car. The mission's success has enabled Venturi to prove the robustness of its vehicles.
"This adventure has demonstrated the reliability of the electric motor and will, I hope, help to prove that it is now possible to travel all over the world with this kind of energy, as almost everyone has access to it. Yes, you can indeed go further with an electric motor than with a combustion engine ! Technology, economy, energy : a new way of travelling is born…" comments Xavier Chevrin.
A positive message regarding the electric car's reliability that our two adventurers have conveyed throughout their adventure. They have shown that technological solutions developed by Venturi in the field of electric propulsion are both reliable and suitable for all types of conditions, even the most arduous.
