Kumho Tyres have helped Volkswagen celebrate its 70th anniversary in Australia by enabling adventurer Rainer Zeitlow to capture a Guinness World Record for the biggest GPS image made by a vehicle, during an epic 23000km drive across some of the Island Continent’s toughest and most testing roads.
During the journey, driving a brand new Volkswagen ID.4 GTX equipped with Kumho HP71 EV tyres, Zeitlow and his team, including co-driver and photographer Marius Biela, wrote ’70 years of VeeDub’ in a GPS trace before completing the trip with a circumnavigation of the country.
The pair in the new Volkswagen electric car arrived back in Sydney having only incurred one easily repaired puncture on the entire journey, underlining the performance and durability of the Kumho tyres, which are OE fit on the ID.4.
Volkswagen chose the conclusion of the epic record run to launch the new ID.4 and its sibling, the ID.5 into the Australian market.
The ID.4 record drive took seven weeks to compete and covered NSW, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, with the car tackling the full gamut of conditions, including sand, snow, heat, gravel roads, flooding rain and mud.
According to Rainer Zeitlow the Kumho HP71 EV tyres performed superbly during the torture test they endured on the almost two month journey.
“I was absolutely overwhelmed by the performance of the EV specific HP71 tyres from Kumho, which proved they were not just great on bitumen but fantastic on every surface in Australia,” said Rainer Zeitlow.
“They performed well on every kind of surface and we had no problems at all, which meant we didn’t have to change a thing, or worry about anything in 24,000km, so we could just drive and concentrate on our journey,” he said.
“The Kumhos simply did a great job, danke,” Zeitlow concluded.
Kumho Tyres Australia, director of sales and marketing David Basha said Kumho was proud to partner with Volkswagen to mark its 70th anniversary with an epic drive around the harshest country on the planet.
“The performance of the Kumho HP71 EV tyres really speaks for itself, but to cover that territory and those conditions with only one small, later repaired puncture, over 23,000kms is a pretty impressive performance,” said David Basha.
“Volkswagen ID.4 buyers will get to experience that same reliability and performance on their car’s tyres, as they are fitted as standard equipment on the battery electric hatch in Australia,” he added.
With the Guinness Record now in the bag and the 23,000km around Australia odyssey is complete, Rainer Zeitlow and his team are about to embark on another testing Australian drive, this time tackling Australia’s 10 deserts in a Kumho equipped Volkswagen Amarok Style V6.
