Traveling 13,000 miles in 100 days would be a daunting task for almost anyone, but make that trip on an electric motorcycle through remote terrain in countries that speak a foreign language, and the journey is beyond challenging. Unless you’re Ewan McGregor – yeah, THAT Ewan McGregor – who took just such a trip with his long standing partner in two-wheeled daring-do, Charley Boorman, documenting it all for the new Apple TV+ documentary television series debuting Friday, Long Way Up.

“I’d lay in bed at night going, ‘Oh, what? We’re waiting for a break in the snow to start on electric bikes, and there's nowhere to plug them in from here until halfway up the country? What are we doing?” McGregor told Spectrum News 1.

That was just a year ago, when McGregor and Boorman met at the bottom of South America in freezing weather to begin a trip that would take them from Ushuaia, Argentina, through 13 countries and two continents before rolling into the relatively safe haven of Los Angeles three months later.

McGregor, 49, and Boorman, 54, have taken two previous adventure motorcycle trips for TV. The 2004 series, Long Way Round had them wheeling across the globe from London to New York traveling east through Europe and Asia. For the 2007 documentary series, Long Way Down, they pretty much did the same thing, only from Scotland to South Africa.

The two have known each other since 1997, when they met on a movie set and bonded over their mutual love of motorcycles. 

For the first two Long Way documentaries, the pair rode gas-powered BMW adventure bikes. For Long Way Up, they go electric, breaching a new frontier in motorcycling. 

In the first of the 11, hour-long episodes that make up the series, McGregor and Boorman test ride Zero Motorcycles, marveling at the acceleration, the quietude, and the smoothness, but for the documentary, they are riding modified versions of Harley-Davidson’s first-ever electric bike, the LiveWire.

“I just think it’s the future,” said McGregor, who has solar panels at his Los Angeles home and has also retrofit a gas-powered 1954 VW Beetle to run on batteries. “It made a challenge more of a challenge. It’s a paved road most of the way, so it wasn’t like our other two trips, which were a lot of off-road stuff. This added a little bit more drama into it as well. Gave us something to be worrying about all the time.”

In the first few episodes of the series, McGregor and Boorman routinely struggle with recharging their bikes in remote parts of Argentina. At a hotel, they blew out the electricity. On their way to catch a ferry, McGregor completely runs out of charge and needs to be towed with one of the electric Rivian R1T trucks that were also custom built for Long Way Up.

Riding electrics, “You have to work a bit harder at it, you have to think a bit more about it, but it’s satisfying,” McGregor said. “It can be done.”

As EV West owner Michael Bream said in the first episode, doing the trip with electrics ratcheted up the drama in a way that recalled Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River. 

“You watch in part because you’re not sure they’ll succeed,” Bream said.

Boorman told Spectrum News 1, “It was pretty out there, and then you’re thinking, ‘My gosh. We’re on electric motorcycles in the middle of nowhere.’ And then you start to think, ‘Where’s the next plug?’ You’re looking ahead of you, and it’s just desert. And you’re 12,000 feet in the mountains, so yeah, it definitely brings an edge to the whole thing.”

Long Way Up co-director Russ Malkin is the one who suggested the trip be taken with electrics, and not just with the bikes in front of the camera but the chase trucks that were providing support. Both were pre-production vehicles not yet available to the public.

A spokesperson for Harley-Davidson said the company’s engineering team had to design, modify, and assemble the Long Way Up motorcycles in less than 30 days. Stock, the LiveWire is a street bike capable of trvaelling 146 miles per charge, but it had to be outfitted to go off road using parts from Harley’s not-yet-available, gas-powered Pan America adventure touring motorcycle.

The Rivian R1T electric truck wasn’t scheduled to go into production until late 2020, but a pair were fast-tracked for Long Way Up. Even so, the first two R1Ts were so far from production just a few weeks before shooting that they were little more than rolling shells. As part of its involvement with the documentary series, Rivian also built a series of chargers every 100 miles along the Long Way Up route to charge the trucks that were in turn used to charge the motorcycles. 

“We could literally plug in to the Rivian trucks and suck some of their electricity into our bikes and off we would go,” McGregor said. “But the first third or maybe even the first half of the trip we didn’t have that technology yet, so we were reliant more on places to plug into and charging stations if they were there.”

For Boorman, going electric just added to the adventure as they wheeled over a diversity of landscapes that included ocean views and mountain vistas, from rain forest to desert to jungle, at elevations as high as 14,000 feet.

“There were certainly times where it was frustrating, and ‘Would we get there?’ But other times when you finally got to your destination wherever you were, you weren’t just plugging your bike in, you were plugging into the people and everything around you at the same time, so your experience was actually very unique. We would be invited in, and people were so generous and so willing to help. We never had one person say, ‘Look, I’m sorry you can’t plug in.’”

The Rivian chargers dotting the Long Way Up route are still there, should another intrepid, green-jeans motorcyclist want to replicate the journey.

“That’s sort of our legacy that we left behind,’ McGregor said, "so people can use them if they want to try it." 

Armchair travelers can, of course, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey as they watch Long Way Up.