Electric car goes 1000km on a single charge

Electric car goes 1000km on a single charge
A Japanese group has managed to travel 1000km in an electric car without recharging.

A group of Japanese electric car enthusiasts has broken its own Guinness world record by driving a modified Daihatsu Mira more than 1000km on a single charge.

Japan's Kyodo News says the Mira was powered by a bank of 8320 Sanyo lithium-ion batteries commonly found in personal computers.

The current Guinness record stands at 555km for a journey between Tokyo and Osaka, but the group has asked record keepers to recognise the new effort, achieved at a race track in the Ibaraki Prefecture.

But the new effort was not without compromises. The team of 17 drivers managed an average speed of just 40km/h and the effort took 27-and-a-half hours.

Range remains one of the biggest barriers to consumer acceptance of electric cars, with most mass-market EVs due on the market in the next couple of years restricted to a range of just 160km.