Range Rover Hybrid_ From China to Mumbai

The whole Silk Trail is such a challenge. Just think about the number of countries we go across. I have so many impressions and I don't think I can store everything in my memory. But highlight for sure is Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, going all the way to the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway down to Kathmandu and then going all the way through Nepal, India, passing the well-known Taj Mahal to get to Mumbai. In terms of heat and humidity, we have engineered these cars to operate between minus 30 and plus 40. When I joined in Delhi, the temperature was around about 35 degrees. The hybrid system itself functioned as expected. But of course, in those kind of conditions, your vehicle loads are quite high. For example, you'd have the air-con on full blast for a longer period of time than you would at a lower ambient temperature. The most efficient way to harvest energy is by regeneration. So you regenerate using the brakes. That energy that you would normally waste as heat, you're actually recovering that and storing it in the battery. And you can use that when you're cruising or pulling away in EV. The kind of driving that we've seen and the mix of driving that we've seen and the fuel economy that we've seen proves to us that the hybrid system is doing its job as we intended it to do. We would struggle to actually repeat these exact conditions in a laboratory environment. So to be on this expedition is a real eye-opener. And it proves to us that we've done the right thing. We've gone through the right procedures, we've gone through the right tests, we've engineered and designed the right limits that we can see the cars performing so well in the real-world environment. Every member of the team who took part in the expedition, right the way from leaving Solihull, right the way through to Mumbai, got a great deal out of it because it was the first time they'd actually experienced the vehicles in a real environment. We tested them, obviously, but it's the first time they'd been in a real environment with external people, either journalists, driving the cars. We did things that we wouldn't even have dared do under normal conditions. The excitement of joining the expedition in Jaipur was palpable when I arrived. Not only was I joining a really exciting expedition, it was my first experience of that country. The climate, the sort of richness of the territory and even the smell and feel of India, the whole thing was just terribly exciting. We sent back a huge amount of data throughout the trail and all of that's been analysed in real time. We kept analysing it as it was going on and made a few little tweaks to the whole set-up of the car. But I think the nice thing is we didn't have to change too much from the trail. All it really did was confirm that we were pretty much in the right place. Sitting in the lead vehicle of the three vehicles as we drove into Mumbai, it was tremendously exciting for one thing. We had quite an entourage there to greet us and a band of local people and all sorts of people there to greet us. But also, you know, great sense of achievement as well as the sort of huge excitement. And honestly, for me to be sort of dancing outside the car and waving a flag in the air was not my normal behaviour. So I certainly got carried away in the sort of heat of the excitement, the emotion of the event. Yeah, it was tremendous. When we set off on this project three or so years ago, the objective was to make a hybrid Range Rover with great fuel economy and low CO2 emissions that really worked as a Range Rover. So it worked in all conditions, on-road and off-road. And I think what the expedition proved to us, that we've made a Range Rover that is truly an all-terrain vehicle and works in all conditions and is a hybrid. So it proves that hybrids aren't boring for me, that hybrids truly can be a great vehicle and, if anything, extended that sort of breadth of capability of a Range Rover even further than we had done with the conventional cars. And for my team, I think that's a great achievement. Yeah.