It’s the classic British road trip with a twist: Land’s End to John O’Groats, 1,000 miles from the southwestern tip of Cornwall to the northern edge of Scotland — completed for the first time by a car powered entirely by sunshine.
Renault and EV charger specialist Easee teamed up for the “Sun Run,” a five-day endurance challenge in which a Renault 4 E-Tech electric — in cheerful Plein Sud trim, complete with its fabric folding roof — made the length-of-Britain journey without drawing a single watt from the national grid.
Charging by Sunlight Alone
Instead of public chargers, the little French crossover was topped up using a three-phase Easee Charge Pro charger connected to a rotating cast of solar sources along the route: established commercial solar arrays plus portable, solar-charged battery storage units that leapfrogged the car up the country.
The itinerary read like a tour of British solar history. The team charged at the UK’s first commercial solar farm in Chard, Somerset, marked the summer solstice near Stonehenge, visited Swansea University to showcase next-generation flexible, rollable solar materials, and stopped at a photovoltaic “solar pyramid” south of Edinburgh before completing the run to John O’Groats.
The car itself needed no modifications. The standard Renault 4 E-Tech pairs a 52-kWh battery with a 150-hp motor for up to 242 miles of WLTP range — meaning the entire trip required only a handful of full charges, every one of them generated by the sun.
A Stunt With a Serious Point
Publicity drives are as old as the car industry, but this one lands a genuinely relevant message. Range anxiety has largely faded as an EV objection; grid capacity and the carbon intensity of charging have taken its place in the skeptics’ playbook. The Sun Run demonstrates, in an admittedly sunny British summer week, that solar-plus-storage can already run a family EV — no grid required.
It also continues a charmed year for the reborn Renault 4, the retro-styled companion to the award-winning Renault 5 E-Tech, both of which have helped drive Renault’s European EV resurgence against Chinese and Korean competition.
Sixty years ago, the original Renault 4 was the cheap, cheerful car that put rural France on wheels. Its electric descendant just crossed an entire country on sunlight. Progress, it turns out, can be adorable.
Source: Renault UK Press Office
