Watch this Range Rover climb 999 steps up the side of the famous Tianmen Mountain in China.
Publicity stunts are pretty common in the automotive world. Usually, they take the form of surprise reveals at random locations, but every so often we get treated to an ordinary car doing an extraordinary thing.
Take this Range Rover Sport. This isn’t just any old Sport--it’s the new P400e Plug-in Hybrid, combining Land Rover’s legendary off-road capability with the fuel economy of a hybrid engine.
In order to prove that the new hybrid powertrain doesn’t detract from the P400e’s off-road performance, Land Rover decided to test it without the benefit of pavement. But not on some winding dirt road in some faraway land. They wanted to test it in an extreme environment that would work the car’s traction control and powertrain to its very limit.
So they chose Heaven’s Gate, a popular tourist attraction at Tianmen Mountain in China. In order to get there, you have to take a winding 7-mile road up the mountains of Zhangjiajie and then go up 999 steps to the summit.
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Which forces the Range Rover to also drive up those 999 steps.
Considering the wheels can only grip the edge of each step, this means that the Range Rover already is losing most of its traction. And yet it still manages to carefully power up all 999 steps without issue.
This wasn’t just a straight-up journey, either. There’s twists, turns, and hairpins all the way up the mountain. At one point our intrepid Range Rover had to reverse its way up the stairs in order to proceed.
Jaguar Land Rover Formula E racer and 24 Hour Le Mans winner Ho-Pin Tung drove the P400e up all 999 steps with the car in “dynamic” traction control mode in order to handle the intense terrain (or lack thereof). He’s the first man to ever drive up Heaven’s Gate in a time of 22 minutes and 41 seconds.
The P400e gets 404 hp thanks to an 85kW motor and a 2.0-L Ingenium gasoline engine that puts down 300 hp on its own. Zero to sixty is done in 6.6 seconds, with an electric-only range of almost 32 miles.