The first Tesla (and first EV) to drive around the world is doing it again now
In 2012, Rafael de Mestre did something nobody else ever had – he drove around the world in an electric car, an original Tesla Roadster. And now, he’s driving around the world solo again in that same Roadster as a promotional and scouting tour and to recruit other teams to join him for yet another circumnavigation in 2024.
We got a chance to talk to him about his story when he stopped by for a charge during his second solo circumnavigation.
An IT consultant by trade, de Mestre was born in Catalunya and grew up in Germany. Early in his life, he remembers seeing the Citroen DS 21 and really liking it – except for the smell. He asked, why does it need to be so smelly? Isn’t it just going to make everything smelly? The adults told him no, there’s plenty of air; it won’t be a problem.
He wonders, now, what things might have been like if the adults had listened to him. And now, he’s driving around the world – again – to show that all of us can stop stinking up the air without sacrificing mobility, even on the longest and harshest routes.
Past round-the-world trips
The first trip around the world in an EV was in a time before there were many electric car chargers installed anywhere – and certainly no DC fast chargers yet, either. But de Mestre likes to say, “Wherever there is light burning, you can charge your car.” The point is that charging stations are far more available than most people think, and an EV can be charged anywhere that there’s electricity, which covers most of the world (he also saved his charging points in the Electromaps app).
It started as somewhat of a personal challenge – de Mestre had planned in 2013 to be the first to drive around the world once he took delivery of his Model S. However, in February 2012, a Citroen C-Zero took off from Strasbourg, piloted by two French drivers. Deciding he couldn’t let the duo beat him, de Mestre hastily planned a journey and set out from his native Catalunya in the electric car he had available, a Tesla Roadster, hoping to overtake the French team.
Over the next few months, the “race” took the two electric cars across Europe, the US, the Gobi desert, Kazakhstan, the Ural mountains, and Russia. In September, just a few weeks before the end of the trip, de Mestre managed to pass the Citroen and finished the journey around the world as the first electric car to ever make the trip.
The whole thing took 127 days – more than the 80 that de Mestre had hoped for, but given the limited time for planning visas and shipping across oceans (and a crash just 600 miles before the finish line), it’s not so bad for a first time out.
In 2016, de Mestre and 10 other teams completed a similar trip but this time with a greater variety of cars and more charger support. That trip involved one Roadster, eight Model S, one Denza, and one electric bus from the Hungarian company Modulo. And this time, they completed it in the planned 80 days.
Another trip was planned for 2020, but needless to say, travel was a bit more difficult that year. So that trip was pushed back and will now occur next year, in 2024.
Current solo circumnavigation – scouting for 2024
In advance of that trip, de Mestre has started on another solo world tour, scouting routes and locations for next year and looking for potential supporters or teams to recruit and join the trip. If you’re interested, check out 80edays to suggest stops or to express interest in becoming a team. It’s not cheap or easy, though; he’s looking for serious applicants.
You can track his location during this trip around the world, which has so far passed through most of the US – with a trip up the west coast remaining – and then will continue through Asia and Europe:
This trip started in the US rather than Europe because he needed to get a new battery anyway. The original died after spending years in a museum, so the car was shipped to Gruber Motors, a Roadster repair shop in Arizona. Now, he’s got the upgraded 80 kWh battery, raising his range from the original ~240 miles to ~350.
To get the car to America, de Mestre accomplished what seems to be another zero-emission first – possibly the first car transported across the Atlantic with zero emissions (he couldn’t find any record of another vehicle doing the same, only transfers along the same coast).
For this feat, the car ended up in the cargo hull of the Avontuur, a cargo sailing ship. de Mestre said he was looking for a zero-emission shipping solution, but when he called the Avontuur, they told him they didn’t have enough space for a car. He pointed out that this wasn’t just any car; it was a tiny Tesla Roadster – and after checking the dimensions, they realized the car could just barely fit.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an option for zero-emission transportation across the Pacific – yet. So Seattle to Hong Kong will have to involve fossil fuels for now.
The trip across America has thus far consisted of meeting with various Tesla clubs and longtime electric vehicle advocates and testing the legs on his new battery (he was able to get nearly 400 miles on a single charge once). And while most of the country is in his rear-view mirror at this point, he’s still got the west coast to conquer in the next couple of days. There are a couple of events and meetups planned. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the most recent updates to the calendar (and expect changes – he’s going around the world in a Roadster, after all).
Looking ahead to Asia, another goal of this trip is to take a different route than before. Previous trips have included significant legs through Russia, which is an easier and more developed route to cross Asia.
But with the war in Ukraine and the stranglehold that Russia has over the European fossil energy supply, de Mestre wants to take another route. He’ll avoid Russia by taking a ferry from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan across the Caspian Sea and entering Europe through Turkey. This will demonstrate how Russia could be cut out of commerce if it’s going to continue its aggressive actions.
He would also like to see more penetration of electric cars into areas outside of Europe, the US, and China and is working to coordinate the installation of charging points along his route. These other parts of the world are “like Europe was in 2012” – there are only a few EVs around, with a small but dedicated group of advocates. (Kazakhstan’s Tesla club has about seven people in it.) If the rest of the world can follow a similar trajectory, albeit delayed a bit, we’ll be on a good path toward easing the climate crisis.
Plans for 2024 and beyond
For the 2024 rally, de Mestre hopes to get 12 teams to complete 40,000 km of electric driving in 80 days – 500 km per day, consistently, for almost three months, even in the face of sometimes-slow charging, border crossings, and reliability issues. He’s planning to certify it as an official world record so that each team involved will have bragging rights that they were involved in one.
He also dreams of eventually completing a trip that involves driving to the Bering Strait and taking an all-electric car ferry across, completing a zero-emission circumnavigation in an electric car.
This is technologically possible, as there are electric car ferries already in use that would be capable of the journey, but none of them (nor any car ferry) travel between Alaska and Russia. So the political question, here, is a greater one than the technological one.
This brings up the point that the most frustrating moments of de Mestre’s trips have been at borders: visa troubles, fees, waiting for approvals, and so on. Between these troubles and the international nature of climate change, de Mestre has largely decided that borders are a roadblock to solving many of the world’s problems. When two countries are polluting across borders, rather than working together to solve the problem, what will often happen is that each one blames the other and does nothing to improve the situation – all the while, the global problem continues.
But these dreams are further in the future or perhaps can’t be solved by a single around-the-world trip. In the meantime, he’s focused on planning for next year’s trip, which starts in May. Find out more at 80edays.com, and follow the current trip on Instagram at @80edays_official or on X at @chargelocator.
Electrek’s Take
Some may ask what the purpose of a stunt like this is, thinking that it’s just a waste of time, money, energy, and so on. But this can be asked of many human pursuits, including many that are more useless than this.
There always needs to be someone who’s first to do something, who pushes the boundaries and shows people that something is possible.
And in this case, I am just one person who heard about the first trip way back in 2012 and yet have used it as an example countless times to show people that electric cars are more capable than they might have thought.
Maybe you live in Fresno and think there aren’t enough chargers near you because you aren’t in a huge city like LA… but if a car that can’t supercharge and uses a plug that no modern car does can make it through the Gobi desert, well, maybe Fresno isn’t so difficult after all.
A stunt like this provides an object lesson: if an IT consultant can pick up with little notice and drive an electric car around the world, with as little public charging support (and no supercharging) as there was in 2012, and then 10 more teams can do it again in 2016, and hopefully more teams again in 2024… then why are your circumstances so much more impossible? Maybe it’s not that hard after all.
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Environment
‘Bitcoin Family’ hides crypto codes etched onto metal cards on four continents after recent kidnappings
The Taihuttus on a ski trip to Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. They sold everything they owned in 2017 to bet on bitcoin — and now travel full-time as a family of five.
Didi Taihuttu
A wave of high-profile kidnappings targeting cryptocurrency executives has rattled the industry — and prompted a quiet security revolution among some of its most visible evangelists.
Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called “Bitcoin Family,” said he overhauled the family’s entire security setup after a string of threats.
The Taihuttus — who sold everything they owned in 2017, from their house to their shoes, to go all-in on bitcoin when it was trading around $900 — have long lived on the outer edge of crypto ideology. They travel full-time with their three daughters and remain entirely unbanked.
Over the past eight months, he said, the family ditched hardware wallets in favor of a hybrid system: Part analog, part digital, with seed phrases encrypted, split, and stored either through blockchain-based encryption services or hidden across four continents.
“We have changed everything,” Taihuttu told CNBC on a call from Phuket, Thailand. “Even if someone held me at gunpoint, I can’t give them more than what’s on my wallet on my phone. And that’s not a lot.”
CNBC first reported on the family’s unconventional storage system in 2022, when Taihuttu described hiding hardware wallets across multiple continents — in places ranging from rental apartments in Europe to self-storage units in South America.
The Taihuttu family dressed up for Halloween in Phuket, Thailand, where they recently moved homes after receiving disturbing messages pinpointing their location from YouTube videos.
Didi Taihuttu
As physical attacks on crypto holders become more frequent, even they are rethinking their exposure.
This week, Moroccan police arrested a 24-year-old suspected of orchestrating a series of brutal kidnappings targeting crypto executives.
One victim, the father of a crypto millionaire, was allegedly held for days in a house south of Paris — and reportedly had a finger severed during the ordeal.
In a separate case earlier this year, a co-founder of French wallet firm Ledger and his wife were abducted from their home in central France in a ransom scheme that also targeted another Ledger executive.
Last month in New York, authorities said, a 28-year-old Italian tourist was kidnapped and tortured for 17 days in a Manhattan apartment by attackers trying to extract his bitcoin password — shocking him with wires, beating him with a gun, and strapping an Apple AirTag around his neck to track his movements.
The common thread: The pursuit of crypto credentials that enable instant, irreversible transfers of virtual assets.
“It is definitely frightening to see a lot of these kidnappings happen,” said JP Richardson, CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus. He urged users to take security into their own hands by choosing self-custody, storing larger sums on hardware wallets, and — for those holding significant assets — exploring multi-signature wallets, a setup typically used by institutions.
Richardson also recommended spreading funds across different wallet types and avoiding large balances in hot wallets to reduce risk without sacrificing flexibility.
That rising sense of vulnerability is fueling a new demand for physical protection with insurance firms now racing to offer kidnap and ransom (K&R) policies tailored to crypto holders.
But Taihuttu isn’t waiting for corporate solutions. He’s opted for complete decentralization — of not just his finances, but his personal risk profile.
As the family prepares to return to Europe from Thailand, safety has become a constant topic of conversation.
“We’ve been talking about it a lot as a family,” Taihuttu said. “My kids read the news, too — especially that story in France, where the daughter of a CEO was almost kidnapped on the street.”
Now, he said, his daughters are asking difficult questions: What if someone tries to kidnap us? What’s the plan?
One of the steel plates the Taihuttu family uses to store part of their bitcoin seed phrase. Didi etched it by hand using a hammer and letter punch — part of a decentralized storage system spread across four continents.
Didi Taihuttu
Though the girls carry only small amounts of crypto in their personal wallets, the family has decided to avoid France entirely.
“We got a little bit famous in a niche market — but that niche is becoming a really big market now,” Taihuttu said. “And I think we’ll see more and more of these robberies. So yeah, we’re definitely going to skip France.”
Even in Thailand, Taihuttu recently stopped posting travel updates and filming at home after receiving disturbing messages from strangers who claimed to have identified his location from YouTube vlogs.
“We stayed in a very beautiful house for six months — then I started getting emails from people who figured out which house it was. They warned me to be careful, told me not to leave my kids alone,” he said. “So we moved. And now we don’t film anything at all.”
“It’s a strange world at the moment,” he said. “So we’re taking our own precautions — and when it comes to wallets, we’re now completely hardware wallet-less. We don’t use any hardware wallets anymore.”
To throw off would-be attackers, Didi Taihuttu encrypts select words from each 24-word seed phrase — then splits the phrases into four sets of six and hides them around the world.
Didi Taihuttu
The family’s new system involves splitting a single 24-word bitcoin seed phrase — the cryptographic key that unlocks access to their crypto holdings — into four sets of six words, each stored in a different geographic location. Some are kept digitally through blockchain-based encryption platforms, while others are etched by hand into fireproof steel plates using a hammer and letter punch, then hidden in physical locations across four continents.
“Even if someone finds 18 of the 24 words, they can’t do anything,” Taihuttu explained.
On top of that, he’s added a layer of personal encryption, swapping out select words to throw off would-be attackers. The method is simple, but effective.
“You only need to remember which ones you changed,” he said.
Part of the reason for ditching hardware wallets, Taihuttu said, was a growing mistrust of third-party devices. Concerns about backdoors and remote access features — including a controversial update by Ledger in 2023 — prompted the family to abandon physical hardware altogether in favor of encrypted paper and steel backups.
While the family still holds some crypto in “hot” wallets — for daily spending or to run their algorithmic trading strategy — those funds are protected by multi-signature approvals, which require multiple parties to sign off before a transaction can be executed.
The Taihuttus use Safe — formerly Gnosis Safe — for ether and other altcoins, and similarly layered setups for bitcoin stored on centralized platforms like Bybit.
Didi Taihuttu during a recent visit to Sierra Nevada, Spain. The family’s lifestyle — unbanked, nomadic, and all-in on bitcoin — makes them outliers even in the crypto world.
Didi Taihuttu
About 65% of the family’s crypto is locked in cold storage across four continents — a decentralized system Taihuttu prefers to centralized vaults like the Swiss Alps bunker used by Coinbase-owned Xapo. Those facilities may offer physical protection and inheritance services, but Taihuttu said they require too much trust.
“What happens if one of those companies goes bankrupt? Will I still have access?” he said. “You’re putting your capital back in someone else’s hands.”
Instead, Taihuttu holds his own keys — hidden across the globe. He can top up the wallets remotely with new deposits, but accessing them would require at least one international trip, depending on which fragments of the seed phrase are needed. The funds, he added, are intended as a long-term pension to be accessed only if bitcoin hits $1 million — a milestone he’s targeting for 2033.
The shift toward multiparty protections extends beyond just multi-signature. Multi-party computation, or MPC, is gaining traction as a more advanced security model.
Didi, Romaine, and their three daughters live largely off-grid, managing crypto through decentralized exchanges, algorithmic trading bots, and a globally distributed cold storage system.
Didi Taihuttu
Instead of storing private keys in one place — a vulnerability known as a “single point of compromise” — MPC splits a key into encrypted shares distributed across multiple parties. Transactions can only go through when a threshold number of those parties approve, sharply reducing the risk of theft or unauthorized access.
Multi-signature wallets require several parties to approve a transaction. MPC takes that further by cryptographically splitting the private key itself, ensuring that no single individual ever holds the full key — not even their own complete share.
The shift comes amid renewed scrutiny of centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase, which recently disclosed a data breach affecting tens of thousands of customers.
Taihuttu, for his part, says 80% of his trading now happens on decentralized exchanges like Apex — a peer-to-peer platform that allows users to set buy and sell orders without relinquishing custody of their funds, marking a return to crypto’s original ethos.
While he declined to reveal his total holdings, Taihuttu did share his goal for the current bull cycle: a $100 million net worth, with 60% still held in bitcoin. The rest is a mix of ether, layer-1 tokens like solana, link, sui, and a growing number of AI and education-focused startups — including his own platform offering blockchain and life-skills courses for kids.
Lately, he’s also considering stepping back from the spotlight.
“It’s really my passion to create content. It’s really what I love to do every day,” he said. “But if it’s not safe anymore for my daughters … I really need to think about them.”
WATCH: ‘Bitcoin Family’ tracks moon cycles to make crypto investment decisions
Tesla’s head of Optimus humanoid robot, Milan Kovac, announced that he is leaving the automaker after 9 years.
It leaves just as CEO Elon Musk claimed that the humanoid robot is going to make Tesla a”$25 trillion company.”
Electrek first reported on Tesla hiring Kovac back in 2016 to work on the early Autopilot program. At the time, we noted that the young engineer had an interesting background in machine learning.
He quickly rose through the ranks and ended up leading Autopilot software engineering from 2019 to 2022.
In 2022, he started working on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program.
Late last year, he was promoted to Vice President in charge of the complete Optimus program, as CEO Elon Musk began to tout the program as critical to Tesla’s future.
Musk claimed that Optimus could generate $10 trillion in revenue per year and make Tesla a $25 trillion company. These claims are largely unsubstantiated as the humanoid robot market is still in its infancy.
Most market research firms currently estimate the size of the humanoid robot market to be in the low single-digit billions of dollars, with growth projections through 2032 ranging from $15 billion to $80 billion.
That would represent impressive growth, but nowhere near what Musk is touting to investors.
Today, Kovac announced that he is leaving Tesla for personal reasons:
This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for Elon Musk and the team is ironclad – Tesla team forever.
Kovac has been regarded as one of the top new technical executives at Tesla, which has seen a significant talent exodus of top engineers.
The company has made progress with the Optimus program over the last year. Still, many have been skeptical, as Tesla has been less than forthcoming about using teleoperation in previous demonstrations.
Kovac is not the only Optimus engineer to leave Tesla recently.
Figure, another company developing humanoid robots, has recently poached Zackary Bernholtz, a 7-year veteran at Tesla and most recently a Staff Technical Program Manager.
Electrek’s Take
This is a significant loss for Tesla. Kovac was one of Musk’s top technical guys and literally the head of the program he claimed would bring Tesla to the next level – although I think most people have been understandably skeptical about these claims.
I’ve been bullish on humanoid robots, and I could see Tesla being a player in the field, but it’s nowhere near the opportunity that Musk is claiming, and there’s also plenty of competition with no clear evidence that Tesla has any significant lead, if any.
In China, Unitree has been making impressive progress, and it is already selling a humanoid robot.
In the US, Figure has also been making a lot of progress lately:
I think it’s a smart space to invest in for manufacturing companies like Tesla, but there’s going to be a lot of competition.
It’s too early to say who will come out on top.
As for Kovac leaving, I’m sure his personal reason is correct. However, we often see people claim that and then they quickly turn up at another company.
If he believed that his product would soon become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, I doubt he would be leaving, but you never know. 9 years at Tesla is some hard work and it’s impressive for anyone. Congrats.
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