Special Toyota Land Cruiser hits 370km/h – take a look at video

May 9, 2017 by Alastair Sloane

A Toyota Land Cruiser with a 5.7-litre V8 petrol engine modified to deliver around 1500kW via a special race transmission has become the world’s fastest SUV.

The so-called Land Speed Cruiser was built by Toyota’s Motorsports Technical Centre in the US. It sprinted to an unofficial but GPS-verified top speed of 370.18km/h (230.02mph.

The previous record was 340km/h (211mph) set by a Brabus-tuned Mercedes-Benz GLK with a twin-turbo 6.3-litre V12 generating 552kW of power and 1349Nm of torque.

Former NASCAR driver Carl Edwards was at the wheel of the Toyota on a 4km-long runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, a working airport.

He said after the record run: “At 225mph (362km/h), the thing was wandering a little bit. All I could think was that Craig (the project’s test driver) said, ‘No matter what, just keep your foot in it,’ and we got 230mph.”

The Land Speed Cruiser is a single-seat vehicle, with a stripped out interior and roll cage. It uses a version of the 5.7-litre engine from the standard US-spec Land Cruiser, but with toughened-up internals. It was fitted with two Garrett turbochargers, said to be the size of volleyballs to produce up to 55psi of boost.

Engineers lowered the Land Cruiser to reduce the amount of turbulent air underneath the vehicle. The frame was also narrowed down by 76mm in order to accomodate the wide Michelin Pilot Super Sport tyres.

If you are in a position to shell out upwards of NZ$600,000 for the 60^thanniversary Porsche 911 S/T or optional Porsche 911 S/T Heritage, you’ll no doubt want the signature titanium watch that goes with it. That’s how Porsche figures it anyway. Or, if you want the watch you’ll need to get the car. Both the car and the watch are limited to 1963 units, the year the original 911 model broke cover. The watch – Chronograph 1 911 S/T and Chronograph 1 911 S/T Heritage – and the car carry matching edition numbers. The watch is priced at $US13,500, or around $NZ22,200. The car, says Porsche NZ, starts at $NZ608,000. A “strictly limited number” will go into production for NZ early next year.

Eight European Union countries are pushing to weaken new EU emissions limits for cars, saying they are overly ambitious and unrealistic for carmakers to hit. The eight countries – France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia – said in a joint paper that parts of the proposed Euro 7 regulation, including curbs on exhaust pipe emissions, should be scrapped entirely. They said the limits would force carmakers to invest in improving exhaust emissions performance, money which would be better spent on developing zero-emission vehicles. Taken together, the countries would have enough votes to block the proposal.

A go-anywhere EV concept for the US military uses an onboard 12kW diesel generator to top up the batteries on the move. The all-wheel-drive has 800-volt technology and a 200kWh battery pack to power three electric motors, two in the rear and one up front. Claimed output is 745kW/15,590Nm, or 1000hp and 11,500 ft-lb of torque. The four-seater was developed by the defence division of General Motors and is based on the platform of the Hummer SUV. It rides on Fox performance shock absorbers and 37-inch tyres and comes with “exceptional” approach and departure angles for off-road mobility. Maximum range using the generator to keep things ticking over is said to be around 500km.

The outside temperature in Midland, Texas, was 40.5C when staff at the local office of the US National Weather Service set out to show the cabin of a closed car can literally get baking hot in summer. They mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and laid them on the car’s dashboard – the surface of which showed a temperature of 87.7C. A little over four hours later the cookies were ready to eat. “Even though ours weren’t golden brown, we can confirm that they are done and delicious,” the staff wrote on Facebook.