Freelander's 6,002 m Guinness record is 732 m below a Porsche 911
A Chery-built Freelander climbed to 6,002 metres, four car lengths higher than BYD
The Freelander 8 went on sale in China on 3 September with a Guinness certificate on the stage: highest altitude achieved in a hybrid car, 6,002.33 metres, set in Tibet on 22 August. It beat the 5,980.05 metres a BYD Fang Cheng Bao 5 recorded in July 2024 by 22.28 metres. Chery-JLR has now published how a 2,980 kg luxury SUV did it, and what it leaves out is as telling as what it says.
Guinness certified 6,002.33 metres for the Freelander 8 after a 1,480-metre scree track
The climb covered roughly 1,480 metres of trail with a 200-metre vertical gain over loose scree and unpaved shale in Xizang. At 6,000 metres the air pressure is about 47.2 kPa, so the engine breathes less than half the oxygen it gets at sea level. The previous hybrid mark was also set in Tibet: BYD's Fang Cheng Bao brand drove a Bao 5 from Lhasa to 5,980.05 metres on 12 July 2024 and held the record for 25 months.
The 1.5-litre range extender kept 80 percent of its output at 47 kPa
The Freelander 8 never drives its wheels with petrol. A 115 kW 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder works only as a generator, and Chery-JLR says it retained 80 percent of its rated generating capacity through the climb, which means the turbocharger was running a far higher pressure ratio than it ever will on a Chinese motorway. The motors are the muscle: 360 kW at the front and 250 kW at the rear, 610 kW or 818 hp combined. The rear unit carries a two-speed reduction gearbox, and in first gear a 1.5-to-1 step multiplies torque to an equivalent 8,000 Nm at the wheels. That is a low-range box by another name, and it keeps motor current and heat down where thin air cools badly.
At 2,980 kg the Freelander 8 is a unibody, and Chery-JLR has not named the tyres
The Bao 5 is a ladder-frame off-roader with 505 kW and a 31.4 kWh Blade battery. The Freelander 8 is a 5,118 mm unibody luxury SUV on a 3,040 mm wheelbase, with dual-chamber air suspension and a 60.3 kWh CATL Freevoy pack on an 800-volt system that charges from 20 to 80 percent in 12 minutes. Chery-JLR says the car came down with no structural damage to the chassis. It has published no post-climb inspection data and has not said which tyres it climbed on. The certificate proves one ascent, not a production chassis.
Porsche's 911 reached 6,734 metres in 2023, and Guinness keeps hybrids in a separate class
The highest any car has been driven is not a hybrid. On 2 December 2023 Romain Dumas took a modified 911 Carrera 4S, on portal axles but with its standard 450 hp flat-six and manual gearbox, to 6,734 metres on the west ridge of Ojos del Salado in Chile, 732 metres above where the Freelander stopped. Guinness slices the plug-in categories finely. Volvo's Chinese-built XC70 holds the greatest altitude change by a plug-in hybrid production SUV, 6,003 metres, driven up from the Turpan depression in Xinjiang in August 2025, one metre from Freelander's figure and measuring something else.
5,000 orders in 12 hours at 289,900 yuan, then the UAE before any Land Rover market
The record did its job at home. Chery-JLR took more than 5,000 firm orders in the first 12 hours on prices of 289,900 to 379,900 yuan after launch incentives, roughly €37,000 to €48,700; a 1,000-car Limited Edition at 449,900 yuan sold out before the event, and the six-seat cabin costs 10,000 yuan more than the five-seat one. The first export market is the United Arab Emirates, with a global brand launch in Abu Dhabi and left-hand-drive Middle East cars due around the turn of the year. Europe is not on the plan. The badge Land Rover retired in 2014 came back in June as the Freelander 8 First Edition, the first of six planned models.
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A hybrid altitude record is a category BYD invented in July 2024 so that a Bao 5 could hold it, and Chery-JLR has now taken it by 22 metres, about four Freelander 8s parked nose to tail. The engineering underneath is genuine: a generator holding 80 percent of its output on half the oxygen, and a two-speed axle doing low-range duty. But the outright mark is 6,734 metres, set by a manual petrol 911, and the plug-in class exists because no hybrid has come within 700 metres of it.
The certificate is aimed at the G318 to Lhasa, the road on which Chinese buyers judge an off-roader, not at Abu Dhabi, where the highest road stops short of 2,000 metres. Without inspection data or a tyre specification from the descent, the record proves a drivetrain rather than a car. BYD's Fang Cheng Bao has a larger Bao 8 on sale and every reason to go back up the mountain; if it has not done so by the summer of 2027, the hybrid altitude record will have stopped being a number worth chasing, and Freelander will have won a race with one other entrant.
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