INEOS Grenadier Reliability Testing Goes Underground
WORTH ITS SALT
Some people punish our ultimate 4X4 on the gnarliest 4X4 trails. Some drive it, in convoy, across Mongolia along with the world’s first production Land Rover (Sir Jim, we’re looking at you). Others simply use the INEOS Grenadier to rack up the kind of miles most of us do over the course of a lifetime of vehicle ownership – in just one year. With every kind of above-ground INEOS Grenadier reliability test covered, including 1.1 million miles of testing pre-production, we took things underground.
EXTREME ENVIRONMENT
To find one of the highest concentrations of salt in the world, we went deep. To the largest potassium-salt mine in the world. This happens to be the K+S potash plant in Zielitz, central Germany. A decent 6.5-hr road trip from our state-of-the-art facility in Hambach, France. But it’s the vertical distance that counts.
We’ve tested our rugged 4X4 across 1.1m miles of sand, dust, snow, mud and tarmac on the earth’s surface. Taken it above 2,500 metres. Below minus 35 degrees Celsius. But to test it against one of the most destructive environments of all – salt – we took one of our Station Wagons 1,300m below ground.
A DEEPER LOOK
Salty roads may be enough to damage your average vehicle by accelerating rust and corrosion. But to put our rugged INEOS Grenadier to the test, we knew we needed to take an even deeper look into where to test.
The K+S mine in Zielitz is actually Germany’s deepest workplace. Hot, too. Over four Empire State Buildings underground, you can only put your hand on the rockface for a few seconds before you have to pull it away. So, the Grenadier’s air conditioning will prove important.
CORROSION PROTECTION
But that’s not what we’re here to test. It’s the Grenadier’s corrosion protection, which includes complete electrocoating, wax sealing in the cavities, and powder-coating on the outside. We’ll see how all of this protects the Grenadier against the mine’s high concentration of salt. The plan is for it to stay down there indefinitely, transporting workers around the mine.
Our mine-based Grenadier is predicted to do around 40,000 miles a year, so we’ll see just how well it earns its 12-year anti-perforation warranty. We could be waiting some time for the Grenadier’s corrosion protection to fail, even in this harsh environment. So, we recommend searching online for experts discussing our coating process, to get a sense of the lengths we’ve gone to. How the Grenadier’s protection stacks up against the competition. And to see actual footage of the electrocoating process from our state-of-the-art Hambach facility.
For an even deeper look into the INEOS Grenadier’s capabilities and features, visit our ‘Models’ page.
Follow the Grenadier
Keep up-to-speed. Sign up to get all the latest news – as it happens.