How Far Can A Normal Car Take You Into The Arctic Circle?

You know the weather’s bad when even the Norwegians are finding it tough going. We were barely two-thirds of the way through a drive that poor conditions had already forced many kilometres off course. Even in mid-March, when the beaches of the Mediterranean are beginning to fill up with their first UV-hungry sunbathers, this part of the world had seen enough snow to bring even the hardiest, most weather-beaten people in Europe to a halt.

The plan had been to drive from Tromsø – home to the world’s northernmost top-division football club and closer to the North Pole than it is to London – some 330 miles to Nordkapp, the small island that lies at the very top of the European continent.

Road closures had already forced us to divert south, into Finland, on a route that was nearer to 450 miles, and it was on the leg back northwards into Norway that word came through: there was a convoy system in place to get people through the tunnel to Nordkapp. It would take several hours to get through, and if we chanced it, there’d be no guarantee we’d get back off the island the next day. Our drive would end in the city of Alta.

A mere 925 miles northeast of the northernmost tip of the Shetland Islands, this place is positively tropical. In fact, it’s only the second-most northern settlement in the world to have a population of over 10,000. We may as well have been in Cancún.

The slight disappointment of not making the intended destination was only rescued by being in Alta on one of the biggest days in the town’s calendar – the finish of the Finnmarksløpet, a gruelling 775-mile dog sled race, the 2025 winner of which happened to be passing right by our dinner spot. The victorious hounds were indeed some very good boys and girls.

Why do all this? Well, partly because when an invite comes through to take a road trip to the very top of Europe, you take it. But partly, it’s a handy demonstration of what a normal car is capable of, because our wheels for this voyage weren’t a Land Rover or a beefy Arctic Trucks Toyota Hilux, but a Mazda CX-30.

The smallest of Mazda’s range of combustion-powered crossovers, the CX-30 isn’t a car we think about a lot. We don’t need to remind you that Mazda makes nice cars beyond the MX-5 these days – they look good, they’re reliable, have decent interiors and handle with above-average levels of aplomb.

The CX-30 ticks all these boxes, but would a small, front-wheel drive crossover really be your first choice of car for driving deep into the Arctic Circle when blizzards are closing roads and toppled articulated lorries laying stricken by the road are a disconcertingly common sight?

Mind you, try telling that to the people who live up here. Sure, out in the wilds, you find the odd knobbly-tyred 4x4 and kitted-out motorhome, but more often than not, these wear plates from other parts of Europe. The cars driven by the locals are just… cars, the same sort of compact hatchbacks and crossovers you’d spot in the average British town. Heck, a Volvo XC70 makes it look like you’re trying a bit too hard.

That’s the wonderful thing about cars. I’d love to report that this was some Shackleton-esque voyage, fraught with difficulties and challenges, because that would make a much better article. But it wasn’t. It was simply driving a small Mazda through some desperately pretty landscapes.

Granted, studded tyres are a huge help. These don’t make it feel exactly like driving on dry tarmac, but you have to make far fewer adjustments to your driving style. Without them, the front-wheel drive CX-30 wouldn’t have gotten very far on roads largely covered with a layer of either solid ice or compacted snow.

Thus equipped, though, the little Mazda was an eminently pleasant companion. It just drove about as if we were in Bedford, not several hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. Even in conditions miles removed from what we’re used to in Britain, on tyres that don’t exactly provide the usual kind of feedback, it was apparent how nicely the CX-30 handled, and how smooth and unobtrusive its charmingly anachronistic 2.5-litre naturally aspirated four-cylinder engine was. The biggest challenge was deciding where to stop for lunch (the reindeer sandwich at the Rajacafe in Karesuvanto is highly recommended, by the way).

What was the point in all this? Well, besides proving that a normal, run-of-the-mill car works in these fairly challenging conditions, there was a bigger picture at play. Our fleet of CX-30s was running on 100 per cent sustainable fuel from British company Sustain, made up of ‘second-generation’ biofuels – that is, produced using agricultural waste materials.

This stuff isn’t yet available to the public – currently, the highest percentage of sustainable content you can get is 80 per cent, and only in certain locations – but it drops straight into any car with a petrol combustion engine. When it burns, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is the same carbon dioxide absorbed by the plants used to grow it.

There’s a lot of talk about sustainable fuels at the moment and plenty of wishful thinking about how they might stop electric car development in its tracks. That’s not going to happen – EVs are very much here to stay and address issues that sustainable fuels don’t, like particulate emissions.

That’s particularly pertinent in Norway, where nearly 90 per cent of new car sales are now electric. Even in these staggeringly remote communities, the charging infrastructure is better than in most of Britain. Nevertheless, out here, where distances between towns are big and the bitter cold decimates EV range, lots of people seem to be sticking with petrol or diesel for now.

For isolated communities like this, and for the huge global fleet of existing ICE vehicles, the disposal of which would cause a host of environmental headaches on its own, it really is starting to feel as though fuels like this could offer part of the long-term solution. It gives me hope, too, that as we start to move into an age of largely electric cars, legislators will make allowances for low-volume, enthusiast-geared stuff with combustion engines to keep being made.

That’s a good while off, though. It’s still very early days for this fuel, and it’s still limited in production and hugely expensive to buy. But once upon a time, old-fashioned fossil-derived petrol was in the same situation. Sustainable fuels, it seems, are not the solution but part of the solution to decarbonising cars.

More than anything else, this drive served as a reminder of how capable modern cars are. Sure, if we’d have gone off-piste, we’d have needed something with four-wheel drive and enormous balloon tyres (or more likely caterpillar tracks), but on these nonetheless treacherous roads, there was never any sense that the little front-wheel drive CX-30 – a car that, in reality, will spend most of its life doing the Sainsbury’s run – was out of its depth.

It made it easy to bond with the car, too. Usually, this job entails driving a car for a few hours on pleasant roads, then heading off to write up a review. It’s only the really special cars that stick with you for years afterwards, with more everyday stuff quickly fading into the mental melange of “yeah, I think I drove one of those.’’

A small crossover – even a good one like the CX-30 – would normally be a prime candidate for falling into the latter category. But because the day-and-a-bit we had with the car felt like a proper adventure, every time I see a CX-30 in a supermarket car park, or sitting in the middle lane of the M1, a little part of me will always think: “That’s the car I drove to the Arctic.” On that note, a heated steering wheel would have been nice.