Jaguar I-PACE completes Everesting Challenge

A challenge for cyclists, Everesting involves climbing the height of Mount Everest without really being there. Read on to find out how the Jaguar I-Pace managed it in a single charge.

Climbing has always been a fascinating challenge for cyclists, aiming to achieve the highest summits while putting themselves through a gruelling punishment. These climbs involve steep gradients and slow, grinding cadences to propel the bicycles up the slopes to the peak. The pinnacle of such a climbing challenge would be to summit Everest, which is a seemingly impossible task considering that its quite an achievement on two feet (and hands) let alone be able to ride a bicycle up to the tallest point on earth. To make this feat achievable, cyclists would choose a climb and go up and down the same till they cumulatively ascended a total of 8,848m or the height of Mt. Everest hence the name of the challenge. For an electric car, this doesn’t seem much of a challenge due to the available power and torque to climb gradients effortlessly as well as electric performance not depending on high-altitude air density and oxygen concentration. Doing so on a single charge however, was the challenge that Jaguar undertook with the I-Pace. British Olympic and world champion cyclist, Elinor Barker MBE, was at the wheel of Jaguar all-electric SUV and the Jaguar I-PACE shrugged off the steep inclines, twisting tarmac and near freezing temperatures of the UK’s highest paved road to successfully ‘Everest’ at Great Dun Fell, in Cumbria, on a single charge of its 90kWh battery. Known by cyclists as ‘Britain’s Mont Ventoux’ a reference to the daunting Alpine mountain stage in the Tour de France Great Dun Fell is home to the highest surfaced road in the UK. The narrow ribbon of asphalt is defined by a series of sweeping bends and gradients of up to 20 per cent as it climbs 547m from the start point used for the challenge to a peak of 848m. Elinor completed 16.2 repeats of the 5.8km climb using the I-Pace’s regenerative braking to generate approximately 93km of extended range over the total 16 descents.