The official trailer for the TV series Long Way Up has been released. Actor Ewan McGregor and longtime friend Charlie Boorman completed a 13,000 mile journey last year, starting from the southern end of Argentina all the way to Los Angeles. They rode a pair of Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric motorcycles followed by two Rivian electric pickup trucks acting as support vehicles if needed.
As Ewan McGregor explained in the trailer “I’ve been dreaming of doing a trip through South America for years. But life got in the way. And now I’ve decided to do the trip with my best friend Charlie Boorman. We’ll ride 13,000 miles from the southern tip of Argentina all the way to Los Angeles. And if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, we wanted to see if we could do it on electric motorcycles.”
With the Harley-Davidson LiveWire as the selected bike to complete the journey, McGregor and Boorman did their best to turn their LiveWires into adventure bikes, as Harley-Davidson doesn’t actually offer an adventure bike version. The duo used modifications including cargo cases, light guards, windscreens, and hand protectors.
The duo was reportedly looking to travel around 150 miles a day. As far as charging, McGregor previously mentioned that they relied on the kindness of strangers to help them out with an energy source saying “There’s no real infrastructure for charging in the middle of Patagonia, for instance. So we’d just knock on people’s doors and ask if we could plug them in. They usually do let us. Sometimes we’d camp in their garden at night, and we’d plug in.”
The LiveWire’s city range lands at 146 miles which would mean the duo would have needed to stop at least once a day to charge in what appears to be mostly rural areas, if they were actually aiming to achieve the goal of 150 miles in a day. The LiveWire offers DC fast charging, which takes less than one hour, as well as Level 1 charging, which requires an overnight charge.
The Long Way Up series is set for a global premiere on September 18 on the Apple TV+ platform with the first three episodes being released simultaneously, and a new episode airing each week following.