There and Back Again, an EV Adventure to Dakar | #1 – A Crazy Start

In spring last year, I had already planned a trip to Dakar with my Audi Q8 e-tron in detail. But days before I set off, I had to cancel the trip due to a death in the family.

When Silvia, the organiser of the Rive Maroc Rallye, asked me if I would like to join a scouting tour in January 2026 to prepare the charging infrastructure between Agadir and Dakar for a future larger-scale EV Rallye, I agreed immediately.

On the 4th of January, I started my trip from Germany.

The plan is to reach Dakar and get back to Germany within 7 weeks. It’s definitely not guaranteed that this goal will be reached. A lot of things can go wrong and will go wrong. It’s my most challenging EV adventure so far.

I’m planning to do the tour together with Hans from Switzerland. He is driving a very well-prepared Tesla Model X. I met him in 2024 at the Rive Maroc Rallye, and we had some fun together in the desert. I know that he is a reliable travel partner with a similar mindset, which is important on this kind of expedition.

He will be bringing two spare tyres and two large sandboards, all mounted on his towbar, an interesting construction to gain more interior space.

Hans started one day earlier than I did because he wanted to first drive to the classic Dakar Rallye starting point in Paris and then continue from there.

I decided instead to take the ferry from Genova to Tanger again. Which was not the best decision, as you will see later.

In Agadir, we will meet with two other EV teams from Austria, and also Silvia, who will be accompanying the teams with her hybrid vehicle.

I thought I was well prepared and was really looking forward to the adventure … until my first charging stop at the border to Austria. My Audi Q8 e-tron didn’t start communicating with the charger. And this problem persisted with 3 different charging providers and many different chargers. I was in shock.

All the preparation for weeks for nothing?

I was very close to turning around. It was Sunday, so no chance of visiting a workshop. Then, by chance, I found a workaround to be able to charge. If I wait until my car goes into sleep mode and everything shuts off completely, and then plug the charger in again, the charging starts.

The big question was: can I trust my car and continue driving to some extremely remote places like Mauretania or Senegal? If I couldn’t charge in these countries, the only option would be to get a tow truck to bring my car back to Morocco. This would cost a huge amount of money and would take weeks.

Since I had already paid for the ferry and the cancellation cost was 100%, I decided to continue for now with the idea to find an Audi workshop on Monday morning in Genova.

The next problem was that the highway across Switzerland was at some point completely blocked. To avoid this blockage, my Audi navigation decided to lead me instead across a couple of very small high-altitude mountain passes. I was driving on completely snow-covered roads for hours, and the temperature dropped to -16° C.

The detour took more than 4 hours. Finally, after 14 hours of driving, I reached Genova around midnight.

The next morning, I was driving to the largest Audi workshop just outside of Genova. Sadly, it was closed because it was the 5th of January and the 6th of January is a very important holiday in Italy. The only other option was a small workshop directly in the city centre. After a couple of nervous breakdowns due to the absolutely chaotic traffic management in Genova (both my Audi navigation and Google Maps tried countless times to lead me on roads that are either blocked or can only be used by pedestrians), I finally reached this workshop. They were open but couldn’t look at my car before 2 pm. I had to be at the ferry at 5 pm latest. Not a good combination.

Since there wasn’t much I could do in this situation, I spent the next 4 hours exploring a part of Genova that I hadn’t visited before.

Despite the quite stressful traffic, Genova has some very beautiful areas and is definitely worth a visit.

At 2 pm, I was back at the workshop. They were very friendly and motivated to help. First, they checked the database for any known problems similar to mine and also read the error codes of my car (which I had done before myself, but there was nothing). Sadly, this brought no solution. My suggestion was to disconnect the 12V battery to do a hard reset of all ECUs, hoping that this could solve the problem. Since both charging ports (left and right side) and both AC and DC showed the same behaviour, I was convinced that it’s not a HW problem but rather a SW problem.

Disconnecting the 12V battery on an Audi Q8 e-tron is a huge effort. You have to remove lots of parts to get to the battery. Even two very experienced Audi technicians needed about one full hour for this. You even have to disconnect the HV battery first. The good thing was that I could watch the whole process and know now how to do it myself.

Sadly, it didn’t solve the problem, and only one hour remained until the check-in deadline at the ferry.

In parallel, I was checking all the internet forums for problems similar to mine. And there was indeed one thread on Motor-Talk where a couple of Q8 e-tron users described a similar behaviour of their cars. It seems that the problems started end of November. That was about the time when Audi rolled out the new My Audi app. Maybe it wasn’t a vehicle problem at all, but more a backend SW problem. One user on this thread suggested switching on Data Privacy in the car, which limits the communication between the car, the charger, and the backend.

I tried this idea on the next nearby charger. And it worked! I didn’t have the time to verify it on another charger since I had to be at the check-in in less than 30 minutes. But I thought that this was good enough to risk continuing my trip.

20 minutes later, I arrived at the ferry.

I managed to check in just in time and afterwards drove on the ferry. Completely stressed, I arrived at my cabin and thought that now I could relax for the next 48 hours. Boy, was I wrong.

Just as the ferry was about to leave the port, there was an emergency announcement, and everybody had to move to certain meeting points. All doors to the outside were locked and we were not allowed to move around. At first, there was no information at all. The staff told us that this was probably just an emergency drill. But it didn’t feel like this at all. They were all far too nervous.

About one hour later, they informed us that there was a fire on the ship that was now under control. Quite frightening, especially after the terrible event in Crans-Montana just days ago.

Around midnight, we were told that we should go back to our cabins. It was still unclear if the ship would leave the port or not.

The next morning, there was an announcement that the damage due to the fire was too severe and we could not continue with this ship. Another ferry was supposed to arrive around 2 pm at the port to pick us up.

I decided to wander around a bit on the ship and found many signs of the firefighting operation last night.

Around 2 pm the GNV Atlas arrived in Genova.

Moving more than 1000 passengers and around 500 cars from one ferry to another took another 4 hours.

Just after sunset, the Atlas was ready to leave the port of Genova.

One last view of the damaged GNV Majestic.

And then we left the port.

But that’s not the end of the crazy start.

During the night, we had wind velocities of around 100 km/h, and the ship was moving like crazy. At least half of the passengers got seasick.

The next morning, the sea was a bit calmer, and I could see the Pyrenees, which I had recently crossed with my Audi, on the horizon.

Due to the strong wind, the ferry now had an additional delay of around 15 hours. We are supposed to arrive in Tanger on Friday morning, 36 hours later than originally scheduled.

On a positive note, the weather was getting much calmer now after the first terrible night. And I met some very interesting people on the ferry.

But that start was crazy. Yes, I was looking for an adventure, but I definitely hadn’t expected to get it all in the first days. Let’s see how it continues.