Here’s another sure-fire way to get into the headlines. Take your car through some impossible feat (remember the Jaguar E-Pace barrel roll last year) and the cameras start clicking, the posts roll in, and Bobby Nitro writes about it.
So when the Range Rover Sport Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) took on the famous Dragon Road with its 99 bends and the epic climb up 999 steps to the Heaven’s Gate arch at the end, the media was there (except for Bobby, who was not in China, but likely in Ottery looking for spare parts at the time).
Piloted by Le Mans class winner Ho-Pin Tung, the idea was to demonstrate the 297kW vehicle’s incredible capability as it handled the radical road and traversed to 45 degree incline, bumpily one imagines.
In what was also a world-first, using a combination of Ingenium petrol and electric battery power, the driver engaged what is known as the car’s ‘Terrain Response’ system, to modulate power delivery to ensure maximum grip.
This cabbie is a thrill-seeker of note, as this is not its first rodeo, as they say. The Range Rover has completed a hair-raising descent over 2km at the Inferno downhill course in Switzerland (steep there), set the South African production SUV record at 250km/h, as well as a record setting shunt up Pike’s Peak in the USA.
The Range Rover Sport PHEV goes on sale her in the second half of the year.