The Apple co-founder is claiming the trip will be "research" because the Hummer H1 Alphas - a civilian version of the US military's high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle (HMMWV or Hum-Vee) - will be powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.

The plan was outlined by documentary film-maker and electric car enthusiast Chris Paine at the 2007 Detroit auto show, after Mr Wozniak released some details in July last year at Stanford University.

Paine said he will film the Zero South expedition and that it will be a "race" between vehicles variously running on bio-fuel, the hydrogen fuel-cell, and on electric batteries.

Paine, who recently promoted electric vehicles with a documentary called Who Killed The Electric Car?, said the vehicles will run to the South Pole and back in an effort to prove that alternative fuel vehicles can tackle the harshest of conditions.

Nick Baggarly, an executive director of the Zero South expedition - organised by drivearoundtheworld.org, a registered non-profit group - also said on the group's website that the trip would demonstrate the viability of the energy alternatives. Drive Around the World includes leading scientists from Caltech, JPL, and NASA, he claimed. #paraBoth Mr Aldrin,77, - who walked on the moon in 1969 - and Mr Wozniak are members of the non-profit group's advisory board.

Three of the vehicles to be used in the expedition will later be used as exhibits in the United States to educate youth on global climate change, alternative fuels and the importance of the earth's polar regions.

The Hummer expedition will travel 1600km up the trans-Antarctic highway built by Americans for "road-trains" of crawler tractors to haul fuel and other supplies to their bases at the South Pole. The trip is expected to take 10 days, and Zero South has applied to the US National Science Foundation for permission to use the ice highway.

The engineers preparing Mr Wozniak's Hummer are reported to have received advice from California's Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which has experience running hydrogen-powered buses.

But the expedition by Mr Wozniak, from America's McMurdo Station in New Zealand's Ross Dependency to the South Pole, has also caused concern among environmental lobbyists who see it as a stunt by rich technology enthusiasts based in California.

Alan Hemmings, senior fellow in Antarctic studies at Canterbury University, has already raised concerns over the plan amid increasing commercialisation of the continent.

"If the Americans put in a route to the South Pole, an incredible enterprise, other people think that's ... a more safe route I want to use to go to the South Pole," he told Radio New Zealand.

"This individual junket involving chaps driving down the South Pole (road), if that was all that was going on, one could be sanguine about it," he said. "But that's not all that's going on."

Mr Hemmings said the group's planned drive to the pole was "part of a much wider problem" in regulating tourism to Antarctica, where visitor numbers are expected to jump to reach 50,000 tourists and support crew next summer. In 1990 the number was only about 2500.

Antarctic tourism was almost out of control and was already "by far the largest" human activity on the frozen southern continent.

"Tourism has grown at an extraordinary rate," Mr Hemmings warned. "We are at the break point for mass tourism to Antarctica".

Mr Baggarly told the Associated Press newsagency that his group's trip was not tourism and that it opposed tourism in Antarctica "or exploitation of this precious area".

"This exhibition does not promote tourism," he said in the email. "Its purpose is to create enlightenment opportunities that will inspire a new generation of scientists, engineers and explorers."

The drivearoundtheworld.org group describes itself as "San Francisco Bay area professionals who use long range driving expeditions to promote cross-border understanding and goodwill".

Mr Wozniak's previous trip to New Zealand was in February last year, when he brought a team to Auckland to play a form of polo on $US5000 self-balancing Segway electric scooters.

Some websites have claimed he may take a couple of the scooters to ride at the South Pole as a stunt.