Land Rover ONE LIFE 27

dynamic Kiev T h e e n t re p re n e u rs p o w e ri n g e u ra s i a ’s n e w i n n o va t i o n h u b

Ultimate tuning Why does music move us, and what does the gloriou s sound of a V8 engine look like?

The art of invention G l o b a l e n g i n e e rs d i s c u s s t h e i r d ri v e t o c re a t e

land rover onelife issue 27

editor’s letter Drive. As a verb, it’s what we do in our cars and in a Land Rover it is of course an experience to savour. As a noun, drive is what keeps us moving forward and fnding ways to enrich our lives.

At Land Rover, that drive is evidenced sharply in the new Range Rover Sport – a car that has taken the model to new levels of dynamic performance, refnement and that all-important “go anywhere” capability.

This sense of drive has fuelled our latest issue of ONELIFE. It’s there in abundance in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, where we meet a new generation of entrepreneurs, artists, technicians and visionaries whose ideas are turning their city into a dynamic bridge between East and West.

Drive is also there in the world of engineering. We ask global engineering icons to share what inspires their world-changing work, look at how our brains are wired for sound (including the amazing note of a 5.0L V8 engine) and visit China to report on how a surging demand for luxury experiences and an increasing interest in home-grown talents are changing consumption behaviours.

What we drive gives us pleasure, keeps us safe and reveals our character.

What drives us? That’s something we all fnd for ourselves.

Enjoy the issue.

Derek Harbinson

on the cover You’re looking at the sound of a 5.0L V8 Range Rover Sport engine. For ONELIFE’s feature on the quest for “perfect” sound (see page 16), we commissioned awardwinning Turkish design agency NOHlab to visualise the stunning roar of the new Range Rover Sport engine based on Land Rover’s own sound fles. The spectacular results are art and engineering in perfect harmony.

LAND ROVER ONELIFE magazine is published by Redwood, 7 St Martin’s Place, London WC2N 4HA, on behalf of Land Rover UK, Abbey Road, Whitley, Coventry CV3 4LH. Colour origination by Rhapsody. Printed by The Westdale Press Limited. Copyright Redwood 2013. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited without the written permission of the publisher. Opinions expressed are those of the author and not Land Rover. While every care is taken compiling the contents of LAND ROVER ONELIFE magazine, specifcations, features and equipment shown in this magazine are subject to change and may vary by country. All necessary permissions were obtained for flm and photography in restricted access areas, and information was correct at time of going to print. For additional vehicle information, please contact your authorised Land Rover dealer. This magazine does not accept unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustrations, and cannot accept any responsibility for them. Drive responsibly on- and of-road.

The latest ONELIFE iPad app is available now. Download it from the App Store. editor derek harbinson art director dan delaney managing editor jane cloete account manager emma childs group account director sarah turner production controller russell miller executive creative director paul kurzeja managing director gavin green CEO sara cremer thanks to nathaniel handy, sara mangsbo and designers rob mellis and jill barnard

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insiGhT

04 / From the frst commercial jetpack to the world’s most complex puzzle, and from traditional crafsmanship to the future of edible food packaging, we profle visionaries pushing the boundaries

42 / How to come prepared for polar bears, the smart moves to make in space and what a muscle biopsy could tell you about your sporting prowess

experience 16 / ULTiMATe TUninG Neuroscientist and musician Dr Daniel Levitin on the quest for perfect sound 24 / MAde in chinA Chinese consumers want to enrich their experiences of life. We meet the new entrepreneurs who are ofering more 34 / The ArT of invenTion Leading engineers on the desire that drives their fnest achievements

drive 50 /dynAMic kiev The Ukrainian capital is re-establishing its position as the hub of Eurasia. We talk to the innovators shaping the city’s future 62 / fULL TAnk, eMpTy QUArTer Range Rover Sport’s desert challenge 66 /Across The Top of The WorLd Three Range Rover Diesel Hybrids tackle an extended Silk Route journey 74 / The enGineer’s drive Nick Rogers, Vehicle Line Director for Range Rover, discusses the new Hybrid

vision /bold capability in a modern

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innovators, ideas and inspiration

06 / HiGH TECH The jetpack has arrived. Prepare for lif-of 08 / THE nExT sTEp in luxury A bespoke shoe from kangaroo 09 / EAT THE WrAppEr The next revolution: edible food packaging 10 / HEAr yoursElf THink Enter the quietest room on Earth 11 / HAnDs-on CoffEE Get to grips with the ROK Espresso Maker 12 / MAn vErsus MACHinE The music-inspired engineering of the world’s hardest puzzle

HigH tecH

is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it you? Thanks to the Martin Jetpack, boyhood dreams are becoming a reality What started as a dream in the garage of New Zealander Glenn Martin 30 years ago will, in 2015, become the world’s frst commercially available jetpack.

The jetpack is a family passion. For many years, Martin worked with his wife Vanessa and their two sons, but since the founding of the Martin Aircraft Company in 2004, that family venture has got a whole lot bigger.

The Martin Jetpack (pictured here with one of the test pilots) is powered by a two-stroke V4 engine that generates 200 horsepower. That means a pilot can cruise on a full tank of fuel for 30 minutes at about 56km/h, at a recommended height of 150m. Though if you need to, you could push it to 74km/h and fy as high as 900m.

The frst model will be specifed for frst response agencies such as frefghters.

The jetpack will mean that the ascent to the top of a building could become a whole lot more spectacular than a freman’s ladder. The company is also on track to release a commercial pitch-and-roll simulator by the end of 2013. It will offer the pilot a fully immersed experience using 3D goggles and head-tracking technology.

“This is an extremely exciting time for light aircraft aviation,” said CEO Peter Coker, “and this is far more than a boyhood dream. It’s truly innovative thinking and engineering. Originally targeted at the recreation market, it’s become apparent that the technology has many capabilities only limited by people’s imaginations.” martinjetpack.com

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THE nExT sTEP in luxuRy

at his workshop in Melbourne, australia, bespoke shoemaker theo hassett inspires a revival of traditional crafsmanship driven by a desire for authenticity

photogRaphy: sean fennessy / WiKiCeLLsdesign

“I have come to realise that almost all technological advancements in relation to shoes have made the process faster, not necessarily better,” refected Theo Hassett of bespoke Australian shoemakers Roberts & Hassett. From his workshop in Melbourne, he is part of a burgeoning industry of small-scale craftsmen who are driven by a desire to create luxury products built to last.

“I believe in buying few things but buying good things,” explained Hassett.

“I think the perception of luxury is changing and that people research their purchases a little more in the hope that they will go the distance.”

Hassett’s shoe designs use local Australian leathers wherever possible – from thin but very strong kangaroo leather shoe uppers to rarities such as a pair of emu leg leather Oxfords.

His latest venture sees Hassett partnering with Melbourne jeweller Welfe to produce a range of premium leather goods that combine solid silverwork with leatherwork.

The range was launched at the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week in September 2013. roberts-hassett.com.au

EAT THE WRAPPER

nature has been wrapping its bounty in edible protective packaging for a while now. Can bioengineers do the same for man-made foods?

The idea that the next revolution in food will be inspired by nature might seem obvious. Food is natural. However, this revolution is not the food itself but the packaging. A not so hidden cost of the food we consume today is one of vast plastic packaging waste. WikiPearl, a new innovation created by bioengineer David Edwards in a Harvard lab, points to the future.

“I was inspired by the magic of grapes’ edible skins,” explained Edwards.

“WikiPearl encloses foods and beverages in fully edible and biodegradable protective packaging. Pearls of ice-cream, yoghurt or cheese [as shown above] appear with delicious edible skins made of natural ingredients.”

This smart food idea was hailed in The New York Times Magazine’s “32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow”. So are we soon going to be literally eating everything in the fridge? “WikiPearl opens up whole new options for foods that are not now easily snackable or portable,” said Edwards. “It permits portion control, new favour combinations, it doesn’t melt in your hands and it offers a whole new nutrition source. Not just edible packaging, but healthy packaging.” wikipearl.com Land RoveR oneLife / 09

photogRaphy: pauL owen

HEAR YOURSELF THINK

in a Minnesota laboratory a room has been created that is so quiet you can hear the noise your ears make when they detect no environmental sound The anechoic chamber at Orfeld Laboratories, Inc., in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took Steven Orfeld and his team a year to design, assemble and certify. What they created was almost pure silence. The room is rated as the quietest place on Earth by Guinness World Records.

For Orfeld, it is the culmination of 42 years of research into acoustics, sound quality and vibration. “We built it in order to further our research agenda,” explained Orfeld, who believes architecture and product design are enhanced by having the best data about the limits of the end user – human beings. The chamber comprises a metal mesh foor and walls of one metre-thick fbreglass acoustic wedges, inside two separate compound double walls of insulated steel. This structure is encased in a 300mm-thick concrete block. The resulting interior space is 99.9 per cent sound absorbent with a decibel rating of -13 dBA. Any sounds below the threshold of 0 dBA are considered undetectable by the human ear. This means that you can hear, often by internal body and bone conduction, your stomach, heart and even your ears, as the ears make their own noise when they are deprived of sound. Other senses, including vision, also become more sensitive, potentially leading to acoustic and visual hallucination.

“Research has ranged broadly from hearing instruments to automotive, appliance, audio and biomedical products,” Orfeld said. “Many projects are confdential, but this chamber has confrmed research related to acoustics and undisturbed sleep, and the border between perception of noise and responses to sound quality related to many products.” orfeldlabs.com

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HANDS-ON COFFEE

imagine the perfect crematopped espresso, but handmade anywhere in the world, without the need for a vast machine

photogRaphy: sun Lee

Love of the coffee bean has spread to every corner of the globe, and with it has gone the machinery – often large, infexible and in need of constant power. What if someone found an altogether simpler design solution? Patrick Hunt, creative director at Therefore, set to work on a hand-powered device that would still make perfect coffee.

“I wanted to provide the user with a more involving experience using their own hands to generate enough pressure to extract the coffee oils to make a perfect espresso,” Hunt explained. “And it needed to be the antithesis of an infexible electric machine.”

The result was the ROK Espresso Maker.

Not only is it entirely non-electric, its simple, rugged metal design makes it robust enough to take pretty much anywhere. All you need is access to hot water and your favourite ground coffee. The ROK device was named the most innovative product at the London Coffee Festival 2013 – a simple innovation that makes the life of the coffee lover that little bit more satisfying. rokkitchentools.com

MAN VERSUS MACHINE

Chris Pitt has spent a lifetime immersed in electronic engineering, software development and data systems – but when he bought himself a small computer numerical control (CNC) machine as a new toy, his instinctive love of a maze inspired the creation of the frst Revomaze puzzle.

“I have always been intrigued by mechanisms and the drive to understand the intricate parts of a system,” said Pitt.

In the Revomaze Cosmic Series, he is creating puzzles with an average solving time of 150-300 hours. On completing the maze and unlocking the device, the player receives part of a code. Future editions will provide further codes. Pitt is offering the winner the tantalising prize of the only Revomaze R1 in existence.

“For the Revomaze Cosmic Series, I produced the R1 as a fully working prototype,” Pitt explained. “In a way the process of creating the R1 prototype for the Cosmic Series was similar to an original sound recording made on a wax cylinder.

The original R1 prototype is as rare as a wax cylinder is today.”

Pitt is making the journey through the series into a truly galactic experience.

“Each new puzzle in the Revomaze Cosmic Series will refect a known planet in our solar system starting with Mercury and leading up to Pluto,” he explained. “Each puzzle will be engraved with a serial number chosen when a customer purchases ‘Voyager Status’, making it truly unique and collectible.” revomaze.co.uk 12 / Land RoveR oneLife

PhotogRaPhy: sun Lee

dangerously difcult, the Revomaze is a disc that contains the world’s most complex puzzles. Prepare for 429,981,696 possible permutations

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New perspectives on your world

16 / ULTiMATe TUninG The quest to understand your brain’s relationship with sound 24 / MADe in cHinA New appetites are creating exciting times for Chinese premium brands 34 / THe ArT OF inVenTiOn Leading engineers on the drive to create

ULTIMATE TUNING Record producer and world authority on the neuroscience of music, Dr Daniel J Levitin has spent a lifetime seeking to unravel the mysteries of melody and the human brain words by Dr Daniel J Levitin imagery by nOHlab

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previous page: a visualisation of the sound of a range rover sport V8 5.0l engine as it accelerates, created by the award-winning Turkish agency nohlab. right: the sound of the range rover sport in third gear

Think abouT The lasT Time you heard a loud noise – a door slamming, a crack of thunder. Or maybe you were daydreaming and were startled by the telephone ringing.

One of the most important tools that we have for survival is the startle refex. If you hear a sudden loud sound, you’re likely to jump out of the way, even before you consciously realise what the sound is. That startle refex occurs because the ear has direct connections to the motor centres in our brain, allowing us to move without thinking. It is so fundamental that all mammals, and even fsh, have it.

The fact that we have this refex is intimately related to why a good piece of music can move us to tears of joy, and why a bad piece of music can send us racing for the “off” button on our music players. The startle refex is a product of prediction circuits in our brains that are continuously monitoring the environment to predict what will happen next. If there’s a sudden discontinuity, this signals a change in conditions – a predator, an enemy or a quickly moving object on a collision course with us, for example – and so we’ve evolved to jump frst and ask questions later.

Driven by fear and beauty My interest in the neuroscience of music grew out of having the chance to play with world-class musicians during my work as a record producer in the 1980s.

I found their musicality, and their struggles, to be inspiring and I sought to learn more about what factors go into being able to “think in sound”. Today (as I was then) I am driven to create certain combinations of sounds that I just love hearing – whether it’s the music of Chet Atkins or Tchaikovsky, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Sting, or Miles Davis, there are moments in music that thrill me and I want to be able to emulate that feeling.

Recent evidence from my laboratory indicates that the startle refex prediction circuits become engaged when

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we listen to music. The more we like the music, the more attention we pay to it and our prediction circuits become more absorbed in the experience. The intense feelings of musical pleasure known as “chills” typically occur during moments in a piece of music that surprise us emotionally.

We know that we are not in any real danger, and yet the surprise triggers a physical reaction.

In one respect, this is similar to the reaction that we have when we’re tickled on our bellies. From an evolutionary standpoint, making your stomach – home to your vital organs – available and unprotected to someone’s hands should be threatening. But when that someone is a trusted family member, we fnd the sensation of being touched there pleasant.

You can only be tickled by someone you trust; if a stranger touches your unprotected stomach your brain and body go into panic mode. The same is true with music. When we trust the composer and musicians, when we let our guard down we are willing to let them touch the most sensitive parts of our hearing and sound detectors. When the composer surprises us musically and emotionally, we feel tickled and the parts of our brain that are normally the sites of the fear response (the amygdala, nucleus accumbens and cerebellum), deliver a wonderful feeling of pleasure and chills down the spine.

However, there is no such thing as perfect music for the brain. Musical taste is highly subjective. Music moves us when it reaches just the right balance of familiarity and novelty, simplicity and complexity, but those parameters are personal and idiosyncratic – indeed, they change over the course of a lifetime. If a song can surprise you by completing a musical phrase in a way that your own

Music moves us when it reaches just the right balance of familiarity and novelty, simplicity and complexity, but those parameters are personal

experience

DeSIGnInG A GROWL it took four years to fne-tune the distinctive sound of a Range Rover Sport words by James mills

We are all infuenced by sound. Human perception relies on audioception. Which is why Land Rover has been studying its impact for the past 20 years, in an efort to better understand what sounds add to the overall experience of living with its vehicles.

It’s a concept that has taken the deep bellow of the original Range Rover V8 petrol engine of 1970, and developed it.

“I think the original engineers would be surprised at how we approach the Range Rover,” says Land Rover sound engineer Ashley Gillibrand. “They saw it as an opportunity to create a new type of luxury vehicle, and to see how it has developed from that original concept would hopefully make them proud.”

Today, he and his colleagues fne-tune every audio element. “We spent four years developing the sounds that Range Rover Sport owners experience. Just like the design

or the ride and handling, sound defnes a vehicle’s character and we strive to ensure the driver and passengers experience these as a cohesive whole.”

Unlike some premium vehicles, the Range Rover’s and Range Rover Sport’s sounds remain resolutely analogue in a digital age. Although other brands have created systems that pipe engine notes into the cabin via a vehicle’s audio system, Gillibrand is insistent. “The Land Rover brand delivers an authentic experience.”

He is confdent the character traits of the two vehicles are distinct. “The Range Rover is the ultimate luxury SUV and therefore has a refned, cossetting soundtrack to match. The Range Rover Sport is amplifed, much more dynamic and rewards performance driving with an addictive engine note.”

Achieving that thrilling character has come afer exhaustive research and pioneering

simulation tools. The sofware enables Land Rover engineers to tune the exhaust’s pipes for the desired resonance and alter its silencer dimensions, which, together with the engine’s air intake system and manifold design, gives the Range Rover Sport its distinctive roar.

The greatest challenge for the engineers was working with the vehicle’s new aluminium structure. Its lighter mass and diferent dynamic characteristics made it tougher to ensure the cabin remains a haven of calm when cruising.

Judging success came when watching the reaction of owners as they test-drove the V8 Supercharged Range Rover Sport at Land Rover’s test track. “The moment they experienced a full-throttle run and listened as the engine bellowed and the exhaust played its tune during upshifs, it spread a huge smile across their faces.”

sensory cortex tactile feedback from playing an instrument and dancing

nucleus Accumbens plays an important role in sensations of pleasure, reward and impulse that can be linked to music

AmygdAlA emotional reactions to music

HippocAmpus memory for music, musical experiences and contexts

Auditory cortex the frst stages of listening to sounds, the perception and analysis of tones

cerebellum movement such as foot tapping, dancing and playing an instrument. Also involved in emotional reactions to music

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prediction circuits couldn’t predict, that’s usually a song you can enjoy for the rest of your life.

In nearly all cases, the surprises in music have to be emotional – music is primarily an emotional form of communication. That emotion can range from relaxation to invigoration, sadness to happiness and defeat to triumph.

Building the ultimate soundscape A large part of being moved by music has to do with the quality of the sound. If the sound is distorted, or muddy, the ear and brain don’t receive all the frequencies of the music and so may miss not only the notes, but also the emotional nuance. The ideal listening environment for recorded music is a quiet space with speakers not too far from you, so you don’t hear echoes, reverberation and other acoustic characteristics of the room.

It turns out that automobiles are a favourite listening environment. When I was working in recording studios in the 1980s, Carlos Santana used to take a copy of the day’s work and listen to it in his car in order to decide if we had done a good job. His car was a more satisfying listening environment than the multi-million dollar recording studio. Today, many top musicians and engineers listen to their work in their cars frst as a sanity check before sending them off to the mastering and manufacturing plants. It’s a way to verify that all the components are properly mixed. And car systems are better than ever before. Manufacturers build vehicles today in which the sound of the engine plays an integral part in the aural experience.

Sound engineers adjust the tone and quality of sounds in different models of vehicles to suit different preferences.

Audio system designers are building amplifers with greater power and frequency range to overcome road noise. Research into driver vigilance has showed that listening to music while driving can actually enhance concentration and promote fewer accidents, provided that the music isn’t so loud that it hijacks your attention.

Musicians and engineers listen to their work in their cars frst as a sanity check before sending them of to the mastering and manufacturing plants

Rebel with a cause It used to be thought that musical preferences crystallise in early adulthood and people latch on to the music of their youth for the rest of their lives.

However, Dr Jason Rentfrow’s laboratory at Cambridge University has found that musical preferences change across the lifespan, corresponding to developmental milestones. For example, rebellious styles of music are especially popular during adolescence, but this preference declines from early adulthood through middle age. This makes sense – during adolescence individuals seek to establish independence and autonomy from their parents. Similarly, preferences for dance and party music peak around young adulthood. These musical styles tend to be heard at parties where people come together to fnd potential romantic partners.

Similar developmental trends occur for sophisticated and rootsy music, both of which are popular during middle age. This is a developmental stage when social status and family relationships become very salient.

It’s conceivable that listening to sophisticated music might serve to communicate some degree of status and listening to rootsy music may touch on concerns about relationships, family and loss.

Music is good for you One fascinating recent discovery, by Dr Nina Kraus’s lab at Northwestern University, Illinois, US, is that learning to play an instrument has a profound infuence on language skills. Moreover, musicians have specialised, identifable brainwaves in response to sound that non-musicians lack, which correlate with reading skills and memory.

This specialised brainwave is maintained into adulthood even when someone only played music for a few years as a child – an incentive to parents to encourage their children to play an instrument. Older musicians show improved auditory memory compared to older nonmusicians, and a better chance of fending off the effects of age-related hearing loss.

One of the things humans do that other mammals don’t is that we can clap or move in synchrony to music.

Most people can easily pick up a regular pulse from the music or can judge whether the music speeds up

Land RoveR oneLife / 21

Dr Daniel J Levitin is a professor of psychology, musician and record producer.

He is also the author of This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and the forthcoming The Organized Mind

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to affect their sensitivity to tone of voice in language. That means that when we listen to someone speaking, we use not only the part of our brain that processes language, but we also engage parts of the brain that are involved in our perception of music. Music and language, it seems, have a lot in common.

Extensive work around the world by teams of dedicated and driven scientists are allowing us to take a peek behind the curtain at the brain mechanisms underlying music. In addition to showing us how music works, they are teaching us a great deal about how the brain works, and applications of these studies are fnding their way into hospital settings to help treat people with brain disorders or damage due to stroke, tumours and disease.

We now know, for example, that learning to play an instrument can challenge the ageing brain and help to keep it cognitively fexible and ft, and perhaps delay the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease.

It appears that it is never too late to start playing an instrument; the research literature is full of case studies of individuals who started in their Fifties, Sixties and Seventies and found their lives greatly enriched.

And there continues to be a role for regular listening to music in our daily lives – it can inspire and ignite us, calm us after a stressful day or help motivate us to get through an exercise workout. And all this with no side effects. The continuing scientifc study of sounds still hasn’t revealed the secret of why a simple arrangement of notes can move us so deeply, but it is showing that it is hard-wired into us. We are a musical species.

even infants are expecting regular beats, and this indicates that music is hard-wired into the brain as an evolutionary trait

poRtRait: aRsenio CoRôa

or slows down. Perceiving this regularity in music and co-ordinating our movements to it allows us to dance and make music together.

Dr Henkjan Honing at the University of Amsterdam studies the neural basis for this ability by removing a note from a piece of music and watching what happens in the brain. When listeners encounter the missing note, the brain produces a small negative peak in the brainwave, showing that the note was expected but not realised.

The real surprise came when they tested two- and threeday-old infants and found that they too produced this signature negative brainwave, exactly at the moment of the missing note. This reveals that even infants are expecting regular beats, and indicates that music is hardwired into the brain as an evolutionary trait.

Human auditory perception is exquisitely sensitive.

Most of us can instantly recognise the voice of a loved one, even over a bad telephone connection, and many of us can recognise the sound of a particular singer. And the way that people say something tells us a great deal about their mood or meaning. A friend can say, “That’s interesting” in a way that makes you think she’s really engaged, or that she’s incredibly bored.

This is where the musical part of our brain plays a key role. Research at Bill Thompson’s lab at Macquarie University in Sydney has shown that we use it to understand and appreciate the tone of voice of the people who are talking to us.

In one study, research showed that people who have had training in music, including young children, are better at understanding tone of voice than people who have not. In another, they showed that people who are musically tone deaf have more diffculty understanding the connotations of the tone of voice of speakers. In other words, their musical impairment seems

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SCULPTING THE EXPERIENCE Knowing what you want to hear and how you want to hear it – that’s how Meridian perfects complete music immersion words by James Mills

According to a Mintel survey, 47 per cent of car owners listen to more music in their cars than they do at home. Our portable and home tech may download, play and share our music, but the car still ofers the best uninterrupted, immersive listening experience.

When Land Rover and Meridian formed a partnership in 2010, the objective was simple: provide the best in-car audio experience in the world. Meridian is an award-winning audio company based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, established in 1977. Its home hi-f systems produce a sound so perfect, the listener could be transported to the Sydney Opera House simply by closing their eyes.

The frst product from the British pairing was released in 2011, with the Range Rover Evoque. However, with the development of the new generation Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, Meridian worked with Land Rover’s engineers from the earliest conceptual stages of the vehicles’ design to create a truly bespoke in-car audio system.

For the Range Rover Sport, over 4,000 man hours went into honing the Meridian Signature Reference System, the fagship listening experience that ofers 23 speakers, 1,700 watts of power split across 22 channels.

Although the bare stats sound impressive

enough, it is the quest for perfection that really captures the imagination. Meridian’s engineers were able to infuence the design and layout of the vehicle, which is how speakers come to be positioned in the roof of the cockpit.

“Some audio companies view a car cabin as too great a challenge,” says Graham Landick, automotive programme manager for Meridian, “but we found that our DSP [digital signal processing] technologies allow us to turn it into an opportunity. When designing the Meridian audio for Land Rover vehicles, we know where people sit, what materials are used in the cabin and where the speakers will be placed. Using Meridian Trifeld 3D technology we are able to localise the sound, so you feel as if you are at the concert.”

What they created is the world’s frst 3D in-car surround-sound system. Its algorithms control the height and depth of the sound feld within the Range Rover Sport cabin. Clever Meridian Cabin Correction sofware optimises the clarity and defnition of each individual instrument and vocal section, while its Digital Dither Shaping helps ensure that even when streaming music from various audio sources (such as radio, USB or Bluetooth), the digital signal changes are seamless and the slightest details of the performance are preserved.

The results of such technical innovation speak for themselves. “A Range Rover owner described how he was listening to a piece of music in his car,” recalls Marco Scialanga, the automotive marketing manager for Meridian, “and as he arrived home, he went inside and continued to play the same piece. He realised how much better it was in his Range Rover – and went and sat back in the car.”

“We believe that when you hear more, you feel more,” says Graham Landick, expanding on how Meridian achieves a sound so faithful that it feels like being at a live performance.

“We have a deep understanding of psychoacoustics [the perception of sound]. So we recreate the exact sonic locations of the instruments, singer, dimensions of the stage and the ambience, which provides enough information to the brain that the listener will feel as if the performance is real.”

The benchmark is comparing the sound of its systems with real instruments and voices, a practice laid down by Bob Stuart, co-founder of the British company. “The piano is the most complex instrument to reproduce. It has so many variables – the type of wood, the strings, the hammers, the lid aperture, pedal depression, and so much more,” says Stuart.

“If we can perfect the piano, you can be sure we can recreate any other sound faithfully.”

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EXPERIENCE

made in China Chinese pioneers of luxury experiences are ofering discerning customers a whole new way of life words by Jane Cloete

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China is Changing the face of the global marketplace.

Since 1995, according to research by Bain & Co, it has gone from accounting for one per cent of the global luxury goods market to, in 2012, a staggering 25 per cent. This is change of unprecedented speed and scale.

Less well observed are the changes occurring among Chinese consumers themselves. A market once dominated by businessmen buying gifts for others is expanding, diversifying and changing its priorities.

Consumers are seeking genuine high quality and, most signifcantly, they want something with real substance.

The new rich are travelling more and further, seeking out not just premium labels but new depths of experience, provenance and craftsmanship. What they bring back home is knowledge and expectation. They want more than simply a label – they want to invest in something that enriches them as people. Indeed, Bain’s research at the end of 2012 claimed 65 per cent of luxury customers in Beijing and Shanghai now sought fewer products with visible luxury branding. This movement to “know not show” has created a wave of opportunity for Chinese entrepreneurs in the luxury market. It is an environment where authentic, bespoke and inventive ventures can succeed without the need for global brand recognition.

He Haiming of China’s national broadcaster CCTV has observed that at one point both “Made in Germany” and “Made in Japan” were derided. The label “Made in China”, it seems, is on a similar journey. After all, your iPad or iPhone may say “designed by Apple in California”, but this is closely followed by “assembled in China”. As time goes on, more Chinese innovators are going to engage with the needs of these premium customers and begin to craft their own solutions.

The demand for Chinese-style luxury is evidenced in the strategies of brands such as Hermès to create Chinaspecifc subsidiaries catering for local tastes. However,

the confdence of the domestic market is revealed in the emergence of home-grown ventures that aim not only to match international luxury brands, but better them.

Bespoke industries are springing up across China. They are often small-scale, highly targeted and run by people who bring expert knowledge. The people setting up these projects are entrepreneurs who understand that for a growing and demanding middle class, the vast scale of traditional Chinese industry does not appeal. The real capital for frms in the market for luxury experiences is knowledge capital.

An easy, lazy and plain inaccurate reaction to the burgeoning Chinese middle class is to dismiss it as a nouveau riche that follows, rather than leads, the latest

Consumer habits are changing rapidly in major cities of China such as Beiing and shanghai (right)

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trends. There is even a word for this rising class in China – tuhao, literally “earth rich” – but to dismiss them would be to ignore the lessons of history. It was not the ruling elites of Europe who brought innovation and change to the continent in the 18th century, it was the entrepreneurial vision and the demands of the rising middle classes.

And unlike 18th century England, in China the process is happening on fast-forward.

In 2000, just four per cent of urban Chinese households earned between 60,000-229,000 Renminbi (£6,000£23,200) according to a report by McKinsey & Co. By 2012, the proportion had risen to 68 per cent. Incomes are predicted to at least double by 2022. These are explosive fgures. With such wealth comes the liberation and drive to explore what life has to offer. ONELIFE meets some of the innovators who are both powering and fulflling the new desire for experiences truly “Made in China”.

phoTogRaphy: CoRBiS

Bespoke industries are springing up all across China. They are small, targeted and run by those with expert knowledge

EXPERiEnCE

it feels like the lifestyle industry is developing on fast-forward – where so many Chinese industries are leading the world, this is the one that was overlooked Grant Horsfeld, founder of naked Retreats

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EXPERIENCE

The ART OF ReLAXATION

The concept of the luxury resort has arrived in China, revealing an appetite for pampering that is encapsulated in the all-inclusive experience

Grant Horsfeld South African-born founder of China’s frst leisure resort brand, naked Retreats, offering the country’s frst all-inclusive holiday experiences

Grant Horsfeld, his wife Delphine Yip and the naked Stables Private Reserve – his second resort in China. Horsfeld’s brand is the frst of its kind in the country

The idea of home-grown luxury brands is new in China.

This is particularly true in the leisure sector. While there are many excellent fve-star hotels, these are either Western brands or individual Chinese hotels. In part, this is because the culture here was not focused on brand building, but mostly it is because until very recently there was no lifestyle industry.

Three to fve years ago, things started to change. Where the middle class had focused on luxury consumption – Prada bags or Louis Vuitton clothing – this slowed down, and with the drop in high-end shopping came a rise in experiences: travelling the world; trying new cuisines; joining climbing, mountain-biking and camping clubs.

Today I see people cycling for fun, but when I moved here in early 2006 I only ever saw people cycling to work.

This change has happened very quickly, it feels like we’re seeing the lifestyle industry develop on fastforward – where so many Chinese industries are leading the world, this is the one that was overlooked.

Fortunately for my company, this has happened as our brand developed. Looking at our average daily occupancy, naked Stables is currently the top resort in China. This is because we didn’t start with a rigid set of rules from another country that we tried to replicate here.

I started naked (our Western-facing brand) to answer a personal need to get back to nature. I wanted to build a retreat where nature was more important than the buildings, and the brand’s focus was to be sustainable, pure and free of excess. Initially, we targeted foreign guests, but I knew that if I wanted to operate in China I needed to attract Chinese customers.

We created our Chinese brand Luo Xin that translates as “naked heart”. The naming of the brand was very complicated. We couldn’t simply translate “naked” as this would be crass, and a one-syllable name doesn’t work here. The immediate reaction was fantastic. Our customers thought that the juxtaposition of a “naughty” word with a pure word was very poetic, and it created a lot of interest on local social media.

The way we approached the design of our second resort, naked Stables, was entirely from a Chinese perspective. Where a Western-style resort would design its pool area for sunbathing, our Chinese clients prefer to visit the pool after sunset. So our pool area has ambient evening lighting. Then, while nature remains the most important element of our design, we are conscious of how much our Chinese customers enjoy taking photographs.

So we make sure we have created places that are ideal for photographers. This in no way means we have created anything fake, but we have considered where the light comes from or where we need to place lighting, and how to work with our natural settings to ensure beautiful backdrops.

What we’re offering is completely new in China. Fivestar hotels will give guests a good night’s sleep and breakfast, then the hotel’s responsibility ends. At a resort, we’re looking after guests for 24 hours each day, so we need to absolutely understand them. As a result our guests have the opportunity to try things they’d never imagined before: horse riding in the mountains; off-road driving at our fagship Land Rover Experience centre; fshing or outdoor yoga. Many people go on picnics for the frst time with us.

Even the experience of our villas is unusual for this market; it’s a house with a view, it’s not lined up like army cadets, the design feels organic rather than rigid.

Our success is very much tied into understanding our customers. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that to do business in China, I had to throw my arrogance away. By appreciating that the Chinese culture is much older than mine, I was able to accept other approaches.

Many international leisure brands have moved into China and are trying to develop fast. There is one particular resort that has several established properties in mainland China and 30 properties in development. But each property is a copy and paste of the original. While this design is lovely, it doesn’t resonate with the Chinese customer. It is not offering anything original.

We’ve positioned Luo Xin as a Chinese brand with an understanding of Western ways. Our Chinese customers – who make up 80 per cent of our overall clientele – really love this unique brand. And what particularly appeals to them is that, unlike hotels, we’re not trying to sell rooms, we’re selling lifestyle and fun.

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The TASTe FOR Wine

The terroir of the Chinese interior is proving rich soil for boutique winemakers whose small-batch reserve wines are impressing connoisseurs

Emma Gao Founder of Silver Heights boutique winery, a graduate of the Faculté d’Oenologie de Bordeaux and described by international wine expert Jancis Robinson as producing “wine magic”

Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Gernischt, a local variety of Carménère that we grow here. The most common white grape varieties are Italian Riesling and Chardonnay.

In 21 years, only two Chinese vineyards, our own and the Grace Vineyard, have been stocked, but the homegrown market is developing fast. Grace Vineyard is in the neighbouring province of Shanxi and originally planted vines in 1997. There are two or three more high quality vineyards that will soon be producing wines, too. We began here on a small scale but we started planting more vineyards three years ago. Our young vines are one year, two years and three years old. It will take fve years to get the grapes. So we have a newly expanded area of 70 hectares.

Our new vineyards mean we can control the quality of the grapes that we use to produce our wine, rather than buying them in. This is important, but although Ningxia is an excellent region for growing wine grapes,

Forty years ago, hot water bottles were considered a luxury in China, so the concept of luxury is indeed changing, but it is really in the eye of the beholder with some consumers buying watches, others cars and others wine.

I was born and grew up in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, which has become the epicentre of the new Chinese wine industry. The eastern slopes of the Helan Mountains are suitable for grape production and after studying oenology in Bordeaux, I returned here to found the Silver Heights winery.

When I was growing up, there was no knowledge of good quality wines and still, if I ask my farming neighbours about the difference between a good quality wine and a low quality one, they cannot tell.

In fact, they will dislike the good wine and fnd the tannin too acidic. But tastes are changing in the big cities – the international Emma Gao, founder of Silver Heights winery metropolises such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou – where people are more concerned about it has very harsh winters. This means a lot of hard work the quality of wine. protecting the vines each winter season. But right now, Our distributor to these cities is Torres China, the I am working hard with my team, like all winemakers, second biggest importer, and they sell our wine in with the harvest. upmarket restaurants and hotels. These have a clientele I have high hopes for the future of wine in China. After equally split between Asian and Western customers, and all, it is a potentially huge market. The Chinese view wine they have the best quality wines from all over the world, as one part of a better personal life, something to share including the classifcation Bordeaux wine – Grand Cru. It with friends and good food. It is also becoming seen as means the people really know wine in these restaurants – a healthier option than more traditional spirits. both Chinese and Western – and they appreciate our wine.

We now see consumption of both fne wines and For the young people working in big cities wine is everyday wines growing in second and third tier markets. becoming part of a luxury lifestyle. They like to blog about My hope is that more domestic vintners will begin making wine, taste wine and are interested in it as an experience. small-batch reserve wines. For the niche market, creating We receive tourists who are wine lovers from all over China, better experiences for themselves is key and in terms they enjoy the tastings and sharing their opinions on their of wine, the best experiences come from these limited, favourite wine. Chinese consumers are most familiar with high quality products.

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Emma Gao in the Silver Heights vineyards in Ningxia

phoTogRaphy: aLgiRdas Bakas

for young people working in the big cities, wine is becoming part of a luxury lifestyle

Whether you’re a politician or entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to be able to cope with pressure.

The polo lifestyle is perfect to ease that pressure

phoTogRaphy: geTTy iMageS / CoRBiS

Liu Shilai, founder of Tang Polo Club

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EXPERIENCE

The PursuiT of sPorT

in the land that gave us polo, man and horse are once more testing their characters in this most exclusive of feld sports

Liu Shilai Businessman, chairman and founder of the Tang Polo Club and China’s top polo player

Liu Shilai founded the Tang Polo Club – one of four to have opened in China

Today in China, there is a growing number of wealthy people and more and more are looking for unique and challenging pursuits. I’ve not found anything more challenging – or rewarding – than polo. Every sport has its own appeal, but polo is different. It’s the most diffcult sport in the world, played and enjoyed only by the strongest of characters, those who are always looking for a challenge.

Despite originating in China, polo died out in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. But it is making a strong comeback.

When I founded the Tang Polo Club, I wanted it to be a private establishment, similar to the ones found in Windsor in England and Wellington in the United States.

After hosting the frst China Polo Open in 2011, we received an infux of new players. In fact we had so many new amateur players, we decided to stage an amateur competition during the 2013 China Polo Open. By increasing the competitiveness of the amateur game, we are not only attracting more players but also improving their ability.

Polo is an excellent character builder. We had a 14-yearold member who was very shy and nervous, but after playing polo his confdence grew and he showed greater composure and maturity. He’s almost unrecognisable.

It’s astonishing to see sport have such a positive impact

on a person’s character. Part of this growth is, I believe, because you have to master so many skills for polo.

There’s the teamwork of football and basketball, the accuracy in swing of golf and hockey, the speed of horse racing as well as the dexterity of controlling your steed.

The biggest appeal of polo is the constant challenge; whereas other sports can be mastered in a fairly short period of time, polo cannot.

As a country, with our vast grasslands, we’re ideally suited to polo, and of course we invented the game back in the Tang Dynasty. We’re going a step further today and breeding unique Chinese polo ponies based on our traditional Mongolian and Yili horses that are known for their strength.

On the feld, when we compete it’s like we’re going to battle; fghting a war on the pitch. The minute the competition fnishes everyone breaks out smiling. It’s not a normal social situation, battling hard against other strong people, but we respect and admire each other for that.

I believe that polo is providing a great service to society. Whether you’re a politician or entrepreneur, you have a responsibility to be able to cope with pressure.

The polo lifestyle is perfect to ease that pressure. The connection you build with the horse and being outside under blue sky lets your mind and body relax. It allows you to release stress and feel happy.

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experience

The arT oF invenTion Five internationally acclaimed engineers and product designers share the inspiration behind their life’s work and what drives their visions for the future words by nathaniel Handy

Francisco Aguilar Designer of the Bounce Imaging Explorer, USA

phoTography: SaM KapLan and Joe LeavenworTh

The Harvard and MIT graduate has seen the power of simple technologies to change lives. As co-creator of the Bounce Imaging Explorer, he predicts that things may never be the same again.

I’ve always considered service as an important impulse – but service can take many forms. People make a difference in the social sector or in government, but right now I’m trying to make a difference through technology. It’s also important to explore and push the boundaries of what we know and how we do things.

These are exciting times. Look at Elon Musk. His work on Tesla and SpaceX is making a difference to how we travel and explore space. What is really inspiring is how Musk combines his passion for exploring new technologies with thinking about how advances could help change lives.

His are extraordinary ideas transforming everyday life.

The starting point for my work has been radical simplicity.

There is a lot of complexity to solutions like robots and drones, whereas technologies that anyone can understand and operate can have a real impact in terms of scale.

Learning from experience I’ve been in many developing countries in which I’ve seen the impact of low-cost technologies. For example, in Kenya I saw simple innovations in controlled drip irrigation that vastly boosted agricultural output. In Afghanistan, I worked for the largest mobile-phone provider, and saw

how that gave even the very poor access to communication.

But observing the effects of the Haitian earthquake of 2010 revealed my own simple solution to a real need.

In Haiti international search teams did an amazing job, rescuing over 150 people using $50,000 fbre-optic scopes to see into air pockets. But that equipment only arrived after 48 hours (90 per cent of people who perish in an earthquake do so in the frst 48 hours) and was only available to a few expert teams, while 300,000 people lay under the rubble.

That gave me a thought. Could there be a low-cost, easy-to-use tool for deployment that even a volunteer with a mobile phone could operate?

A bouncing breakthrough The system we created, with our engineers in Boston and the Costa Rican Institute of Technology, is the Bounce Imaging Explorer. Anyone who can throw a ball and use a smartphone can use it. And while major disasters happen only rarely, frst responders are in situations where they need to explore hazardous spaces every single day.

The ball sends back images of the space that can create a 360-degree visual of the situation, and we aim to make the balls inexpensive enough to make single use feasible in scenarios such as fre. Our current focus, law enforcement, has given us a very enthusiastic response. We are developing advanced tactical units that incorporate audio, GPS and the ability to operate a suite of sensors.

We’re also working on incorporating a dosimeter to measure radiation levels, and a design that whips around the room for more coverage. There are exciting opportunities ahead. First responders put their lives on the line for us. We’d like to think that such simple technologies could make a contribution to how they lead their lives.

Land rover oneLiFe / 35

Bob Joyce Jaguar Land Rover’s Executive Director, Product Creation and Delivery, UK Bob Joyce is responsible for developing all new Land Rover vehicles, from initial concept to sale.

There’s never been a more stimulating time to be a car engineer. I love inventing things – I think all engineers do. You’re trying to innovate but you have to come up with new technology that is easy to use, appeals to the consumer, is affordable and can also be delivered proftably. I really enjoy the challenge of trying to add value for the customer.

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Car engineering now changes faster than ever If you look back 30 years, cars had very traditional body architectures and conventional engines. Now the car is changing more fundamentally and faster than at any time in my 35 years in the business. It is incredibly exciting but also quite frightening. The big breakthrough has been electronics. This not only changes a car’s engine design and opens up huge possibilities in car connectivity, it also changes a car’s architecture. Electric cars can and will have brand new architectures. There are now plug-in hybrids, normal hybrids, battery electric cars, plus huge improvements in petrol and diesel engines.

Since 2007, our organisation has grown to accommodate more than 300 people in car infotainment systems. Visit them and you feel like you’re working for Apple or Intel.

They are helping to revolutionise connectivity and the

experience

customer car interface, but they are also helping to transform car interiors.

Inspired by British classics As a boy I used to build elaborate Meccano bridges and constructions. As I went through school, I started to play with motorbikes. My frst was a 1959 175cc BSA Bantam.

I got it when I was 16. I still have the number plate in my garage. (It was no longer road legal after I fnished with it.)

I loved that bike, one of the old British classics. I worked on it to try to make it go faster. The frst time I rebuilt the engine I did it without an owner’s manual and I put the piston rings in the wrong way. That was my frst lesson in how engines are more complicated than people think.

There is a lot of work I’m proud of, not least the latest Range Rover, an SUV that critics say is the best luxury car

in the world. I’m also really proud of the Range Rover Sport and the Jaguar C-X75 concept (a hybrid powered mid-engine, two-seat sports car). That car won’t go into production but we learnt so much from it, including how to make a 1.6L engine develop 500bhp and yet still emit less than 89g/km of CO2. It had electric motors front and rear, and the collaboration with the Williams F1 team was benefcial for Jaguar Land Rover engineers and theirs. Lessons learnt will be manifested in our new vehicles.

There’s much engineering and product design I admire, some quite old like Telford’s bridges and various carriage clocks that I’m always trying to tinker with and fx. There’s also lots of new stuff, too. You have to appreciate the iPhone and I especially love a beautifully crafted, well weighted wristwatch.

previous page: the Bounce imaging explorer could transform search and rescue operations.

Above: the aluminium chassis of the new generation range rover Sport, created

by Bob Joyce and his team

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A magnetised fuid clinging to a rare earth magnet. right: central St Giles in London, one of Yewande Akinola’s projects

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experience

Masato Sagawa Founder of Intermetallics, Japan Dr Sagawa won the 2012 Japan Prize for innovative engineering achievements with the creation of the world’s most powerful magnet.

I remember the frst moment the idea struck me. It was 31 January 1978. I was in Tokyo for a symposium on rare earth cobalt magnets. At the time, cobalt magnets were the strongest in existence. The frst speaker, Masaaki Hamano, was explaining why rare earth iron compounds couldn’t be used to make strong, stable permanent magnets. I realised they could.

This realisation led me to the frst ever discovery of the Neodymium-Iron-Boron (Nd-Fe-B) permanent magnet compound – the world’s strongest magnet.

Its discovery offers major benefits to society.

As a powerful, lightweight magnet it could increase the effciency of motors in hybrid cars and wind power generators. Due to its greater magnetic strength, it actually reduces energy expenditure and so is an aid to energy conservation.

During my childhood, Japan experienced massive economic growth and that rapidly developing industry inspired my interest in science and technology. I studied engineering almost instinctively.

I am sure that scientifc research will eventually solve most of the problems that we have in society. There is no other occupation quite as fulflling as that of a researcher, and motivation comes from fnding a research subject the success of which is useful for society. The larger the expected impact, the stronger the motivation.

The next stage has been to develop highly heatresistant rare earth iron-based magnets. By early 2013, I was able to put them into mass production.

My next stage of research is on a new permanent magnet compound that exceeds the current Nd-Fe-B magnet in strength. There has already been much research done, but I have a new idea that nobody has tested…

Yewande Akinola Arup environmental services engineer, Nigeria Akinola received the 2012 Institution of Engineering and Technology Young Woman Engineer of the Year award for work in the built environment and for the sustainable regeneration of Central St Giles in London.

Solutions are great. They keep things moving, they keep us looking forward and they keep us feeling excited.

Growing up in a developing part of Nigeria, I could see the direct impact engineering would have on my immediate environment. We needed improved electricity supply, better roads and clean, constant water sources.

One of the frst pieces of engineering that seized my imagination was the telephone. I few to Dubai recently and at 800km/h at 11,000m, I made mobile calls to friends in London. It’s an extraordinary evolution of the invention.

photogRaphy: getty iMageS / CoRBiS

Drawn to a higher goal I discovered the magnet while working for Fujitsu Laboratories. They didn’t want me to explore rare earth iron magnets, but I had to test my theory.

Working alone, I experimented with alloys of carbon and boron, trying to stabilise the atomic nature of rare earth iron enough to make a strong magnet. When I made the breakthrough I knew I had found something important. This gave me the conviction to pursue my goal. I wouldn’t be stopped by anyone or any obstacle.

I was convinced that a rare earth iron-based magnet could have massive benefts. In the future, the majority of new cars will use my magnets for traction motors. To realise this, there are several important research projects to conduct, including improvement of the manufacturing process for the magnet. I will lead this development and I am sure we will solve these questions in the near future.

Into the atom, and beyond In 1988, after working with Fujitsu and Sumitomo Special Metals, I founded Intermetallics as a research and development company focused on my magnet and achieving viable applications for it in broader society.

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The new shapers of our world I’ve worked in China for some time. It has taught me a great deal about the way culture and engineering interact – from the need for design criteria in hotel kitchens that suit Asian styles of cooking to the importance the Chinese place on fowing water in building interiors.

The world is looking in this direction. By 2050, it’s estimated that 80 per cent of the global working population will be from Asia and Africa, and I wonder: how will that shape our world? What should we expect in 2050 in terms of the quality of our products and our lifestyles?

We need an engineer’s way of thinking right at the heart of some of the decisions that we make as countries and as regions. It’s not just about a faster train or a water supply source in a village, it’s that systematic creative way of thinking that always, always is looking for a better solution.

Chris Wise Founder of Expedition, UK Professor Chris Wise is the chief engineer of British icons such as the Millennium Bridge and the 2012 Olympic Velodrome in London.

I like gravity. I had a mentor when I was at university who was in charge of Salisbury Cathedral.

He let me go up the spire, through the roof and around the fying buttresses. It gave me a profound respect for the materials and the balance – the pack-of-cards nature of those buildings. If they weren’t all perfectly balanced the whole thing would fall down.

Being an engineer is not purely a mental game. The physicality of a structure is really important. Imagine taking a pile of stones and building a cathedral out of it. I enjoy that dialogue with the materials and the physical world.

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I feel there is something special in achieving that moment of clarity and order – like you see in great sportsmen.

Time appears to extend for the very best sportsmen.

There’s an ability to improvise, to do exactly what is required. I love that poetry and grace under extreme pressure. You see it in the way Roger Federer hits a tennis ball. A clarity despite the mayhem going on around him.

That feeds into design because there is so much “noise” around what we do, everybody has an opinion, everybody has their own agenda and you’re trying to keep some clarity and focus about the right direction to take.

if we’re to solve the problems that are confronting us, we need a technological contribution. engineers have a big responsibility professor chris Wise, expedition

Why are we doing it?

I am an engineering design professor at University College London, and every year I ask my new students, “Why are you here?” Many of them say they want to save the world.

With 2.5 times more people on the planet than there were when I was born, it’s obvious that if we’re to solve the problems that are confronting us, we need a technological contribution. Engineers have a big responsibility.

The end of the training of an engineer used to be simply mastering fantastically hard sums without saying why on earth you were doing it. A lot of my students have quite profoundly held beliefs about doing something that is in harmony with nature. A lot of them talked about their family, I suppose as a metaphor for the wider community.

Connecting structures with their environment and community is critical. The project that has given me most pleasure is a bridge in Stockton-on-Tees in England called the Infnity Bridge. Stockton-on-Tees is a former industrial city. For a lot of people there, the last job they had was to take down the factories and ironworks they were working in.

We were a tiny practice up against all the multinational corporations, and we won. Our design received every engineering prize going. We got a huge kick out of that. But more than that, we managed to build most of the structure close to Stockton-on-Tees, employing local workers.

I think the people there felt enormous pride because in their own conscience they’d given themselves an identity again, something that had been lost with the destruction of the old industries. This was a genuinely civic project.

It’s technology connected to people, and technology has a big part to play in our future. We need engineers who understand how what they’re doing relates to the rest of the population.

photogRaphy: getty iMageS

Making a difference I absolutely love what I do as an engineer. Whether it’s a 70-storey building in China or a water-supply solution in Ghana, I want people to realise that basic engineering principles combined with an understanding of why the engineering solution would make their lives better can open doors to opportunities for better education, better standards of living and a more resilient environment.

I’ve worked as an environmental engineer in developing countries in Africa – in Mozambique and Ghana – and one thing I’ve noticed is it’s OK to install a pipe and a pump, but how do you ensure that in a few years, the same community doesn’t still lack the same resources? By setting up business plans, you can get people enthused about managing these engineering solutions. As businesses, the excitement is there. My vision is to create innovation hubs in communities where people can learn basic engineering skills and business skills, too.

experience

“if you stand in the middle of the bridge and look down the long span, it disappears into nothing,” says Wise, “and you can’t understand how it’s standing up – hence, infnity Bridge”

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insight

insight

Thought, opinion, conversation

44 / thE iCEMAn COMEth British polar explorer Ben Saunders has come prepared 46 / ChAnging thE RULEs Thinking counter-intuitively in outer space 47 / PLAY tO YOUR stREngths The muscle biopsies that can identify sporting prowess

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INSIGHT

The iceman comeTh Logistics, training, more logistics and fattening up. a British polar explorer talks through the importance of preparation

poRTRaiT: maRTin haRTLey

words by Ben Saunders — photography by Andy Ward

I’ve lived through what many might consider a worst-case scenario. It was during my frst polar expedition, in 2001, when Pen Hadow and I set out to reach the North Pole unsupported from the north coast of Siberia. We were travelling on foot over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean, dragging our supplies behind us for two months.

Pen was in front, navigating, and I was following his sled tracks. My goggles and hood limited my vision, but I remember a strange feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I stopped, turned around and found myself looking at a polar bear following our tracks.

I screamed out, Pen stopped and our polar bear drill sprang into action. Bears apparently have pretty average eyesight, so I tried to make myself look big by removing my skis and holding them above my head in a cross shape as Pen loaded the shotgun with two of our 12 shells (we carried these to frighten bears off by fring over their heads). Both were duds. The next two were the same – click, click – nothing. This kept happening. We were nine shells down and Pen had started walking towards the bear, while I was wondering if I could fend it off with the pointed ends of my poles, when BANG, the gun went off. I don’t know who was more shocked, me or Pen. Certainly not the bear. He stared at us, sniffed the air a few times and walked off.

That expedition taught me many things. In hindsight I’m not sure I was fully prepared mentally – I had no idea how much pressure that two-person journey through such bleak wilderness might entail. We’d also slightly misjudged our nutrition, which meant that food became both a recurring theme for daydreams and an awkward thing to share fairly between us.

Ultimately, our slower than expected progress meant we had to abandon the expedition a fortnight short of the Pole, after 59 days on the ice.

In the years since, I have learnt a huge amount and embarked on many more successful expeditions. Key to every one of them has been an extraordinary amount of time and effort spent on detailed planning. At the time of writing, I’m in the fnal preparations for the

Scott Expedition, where I’m leading a two-man team setting out to make the frst unsupported return journey from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole on foot retracing Scott’s 1910-12 Terra Nova route. At 2,987km it will be the longest unsupported polar journey in history, and the frst completion of Scott’s expedition, which has remained unfnished for over a century.

This expedition is the product of almost 20 years of ambition and 10 years of planning. One reason it’s taken this long is the scale of the logistical challenge.

We will be operating at the very boundaries of the window normally available for private expeditions in Antarctica (it needs 110 days and the usual window is eight to 10 weeks), which has meant more time spent negotiating with operators and suppliers.

In terms of physical preparation, I’ve been doing 15 to 20 hours of endurance and strength training

Bears have pretty average eyesight, so i tried to make myself look big by holding my skis above my head Ben Saunders, polar explorer

per week for the past year. There have also been four training expeditions in Greenland. It provides a fantastic backdrop to test our gear and to practise skills such as crevasse rescue training ahead of traversing the Beardmore Glacier, one of the world’s largest.

We’ve worked hard to get our nutrition right, and will be eating 6,000 calories daily in Antarctica. Each day’s ration bag contains freeze-dried meals, energy bars, protein shakes, energy drinks and chocolate. Even with unlimited food we’d struggle to consume enough calories, so I’m also fattening up. My target is 90kg, which is about 12kg over my normal training weight.

I’ve loved planning adventures since I was a boy. The commercial complexity of the Scott Expedition has been an enormous undertaking, and it’s taken much external expertise, but I fnally feel like we’re ready. I can’t wait.

You can read Ben’s blog of the journey at scottexpedition. com/blog and watch videos of the expedition at youtube.com/scottexpedition.

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changing The RuLeS The former commander of the international Space Station explains why outer space forces you to rethink your behaviour words by Commander Chris Hadfeld — photography by NASA

When I look around, I notice that we are predictable creatures of habit. Life has a routine and our solutions work for us.

Often that routine is unconscious, and we don’t notice the complex things we’re doing, like how our hands button up our shirt.

But what do you do when you are faced with a new situation? When confronted by something truly strange, what is your reaction? I’ve fown two space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station, putting me in situations that were strange in the extreme. How did I react?

Typically, each of us relies on something we trust, a proven method or reaction that has worked in the past. We call it “intuition” – an ingrained, generally unspoken behaviour. Like when a racing driver has a skid, he has to fght the natural reaction to brake.

That’s when being deliberately counter-intuitive may be the best thing.

When you use your thrusters to move forward, bizarrely, you slow down. This drives rookie astronauts crazy Commander Chris Hadfeld, astronaut

Let’s look at a familiar example – riding a bike.

When beginners get on a two-wheeler and try to pedal, they inevitably start tipping to one side, and their natural reaction is to lean away. That has worked since infancy for standing, walking and running, so our intuition says “lean!”. But despite repeated attempts, because a bicycle is a new environment with inherently different rules, it doesn’t work and we crash. It’s only when we fgure out (or are told) to do

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something counter-intuitive – to turn the handlebars towards the fall – that we start to succeed. For most of us, it takes several skinned knees and a lot of wobbly riding to learn to ignore our natural intuition and force ourselves to do this new thing. But once we’ve got it locked in as our new normal, it’s like – riding a bike.

As an astronaut, you face a similar problem when learning to manoeuvre a spaceship. The natural, intuitive steering actions – thrust ahead to move forwards, slow down to move back – inexplicably don’t work, and it’s very frustrating. You’d think you could just fre your thrusters upwards to move up, but, like riding a bike, you’re in a new environment and you have to rethink your assumptions.

The reason is that the closer you are to Earth, the faster you go to stay in orbit. As an example, the Moon takes a whole month to go around the world once, but the closer satellites only take a few hours, and the International Space Station – just 400km up – orbits in a mere 90 minutes.

This means that when you use your thrusters to move forward, you push yourself into a higher orbit, and, bizarrely, slow down. If you fre retrorockets, you’ll fall into a lower orbit, speed up and pull ahead. This drives rookie astronauts crazy.

Time to think counter-intuitively. Like six-yearolds on a bike, astronauts listen to their instructors, suppress nature and try something that seems wrong.

And when steering the wrong way actually, visibly works, the new reaction starts to replace the old.

After enough practice it becomes so normal that the original intuition is forgotten.

So the next time you’re faced with something truly new, rise above yourself. Repress your primal urge, look at what’s actually happening, seek advice and try something counter-intuitive. It happens more often than you think – and it’s only rocket science.

Chris Hadfeld’s book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, is now available in bookstores and online.

INSIGHT

PlAy TO yOUR STREngTHS

poRTRaiT phoTogRaphy: coRBiS

dr Jesper L andersen, from the institute of Sports Medicine in copenhagen, explains how your muscle fbres hold the key to your sporting prowess The study of muscle biopsies can determine where a person’s aptitude lies in terms of sporting disciplines. One of our most clear examples was with the Danish kayaking team who were training for the Olympics. We took biopsies of the deltoid shoulder muscle in 10 team members.

The results for one of the kayakers were extraordinary. He had around 99 per cent slow muscle fbres. This is very rare. He was aiming to make the 500 or 1,000 metres teams, but I advised him that he should instead try for the kayaking marathon world championship.

Slow fbres are far more efective in endurance sport than explosive strength disciplines, which require fast fbres. He took my advice, and won a silver medal.

Resistance training – short repetitions of heavy weights – builds fast muscle tissue.

Until about 15 years ago, received wisdom was that resistance training slowed you down. Research has proved that theory wrong. Endurance training builds slow muscle tissue. What is more, if you do resistance training followed by endurance, the resistance training is cancelled out. This doesn’t happen the other way around.

We also discovered that muscles respond to protein intake during or directly afer resistance training. So we advise a footballer who wants to bulk up and get faster but not lose stamina to do endurance training followed by resistance and protein intake. Another who is bulky and strong, but needs stamina, we’d advise resistance training followed by endurance training, but without protein supplementation, to not gain further muscle.

However, we still react diferently to training as individuals. We still don’t know what it is that gives Usain Bolt the edge over his rivals, despite having more or less the same muscle fbre profle and training regime. But we are learning about areas of aptitude. And we are discovering other things, too. Take stretching.

It is a religion for sportsmen, but our research clearly shows that it has no efect whatsoever.

If you have 30 minutes to spare for exercise in a busy life schedule, spend it exercising, don’t waste your time stretching.

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The journey starts here

50 / dYNAMiC Kiev The magnetic centre of Eurasia 62 / FULL TANK, eMPTY QUArTer The Range Rover Sport takes on the toughest terrain on Earth 66 / JOUrNeY ACrOSS THe TOP OF THe WOrLd Three Range Rover Hybrids take on an extended Silk Route 74 / THe eNGiNeer’S drive Nick Rogers on the new Diesel Hybrids

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DYNAMIC KIEV Afer a century out in the cold, Kiev is making friends fast and re-establishing its place as the innovation hub of Eurasia. ONELIFE goes in search of the new leaders driving the city forward words by Nathaniel Handy photography by Stefen Jahn

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early morning. A sunburst breaks from behind the gaze of the Motherland Monument. Driving across the Patona Bridge, into the heart of modern Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, there is a sense of traversing the crossroads of the entire Eurasian land mass. On the hills overlooking the Dnieper River, dynamic new hubs of business, arts, technology and fashion are bringing a new energy to the golden domes of ancient monasteries and cathedrals.

A casual glance at a map of Europe and Asia reveals the potential of Kiev’s position. It has been a centre for the exchange of cultures, goods and ideas for centuries.

For centuries, that was, until a Cold War frontier fell on these borderlands between East and West. Today, a new urgency has gripped this capital. In the place where once the adventurous minds of Asia, Europe and the Middle East mingled, they are connecting once again. This is the story of Kiev – a city that came in from the cold, rediscovered itself and is now opening up to the new global village.

Build it and they will come “We have very talented people who in some sense are more free here than elsewhere.” So says Sergey Makhno. He is one of a new generation of Ukrainian architects and designers who want to open the eyes of Kievans to the possibilities of the spaces that they inhabit, and how the built environment can enhance their experience of life more broadly. They are a generation who are fnding the freedom, drive and versatility to realise their vision.

Makhno, alongside his contemporaries such as Slava Balbek and Vladimir Nepiyvoda, is taking the old ways and reinventing them. “We respect the older generation but, you know, theirs was a different time

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A new sense of style The excitement that Sergey Makhno feels is in the air these days. 2012 saw Kiev’s Olympic Stadium hosting the fnal of the European football championships and the launch of the Kiev Biennale of Contemporary Art at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, set to become the largest art museum in Europe by 2014. It is also refected in the rise

of Ukrainian Fashion Week – the platform from which young designers such as Svetlana Bevza are propelling Ukrainian fashion onto the global stage.

Bevza has been exhibiting at Ukrainian Fashion Week for seven years and she is a key player in driving its success. “It’s just the beginning for the Ukrainian industry, but it’s got real potential. Ukrainian Fashion Week has developed very quickly because it brings foreign fashion editors, bloggers and line researchers to Ukraine.”

She is proof that with the creativity that has blossomed in the new-found cultural space since independence, so too has an appetite for entrepreneurial success. “The popularity of the fashion business in Ukraine is growing.

A few years ago, the fashion industry in Ukraine was something like a theatre – it was not a serious business,” she explains. “I’m a designer and I like to create clothes, but I consider my creativity as a business.”

It’s a business with a future, as Ukraine starts to attract ever more interest from around the world. In 2013, Bevza was selected by Sara Maino, fashion editor of Vogue Italy, as one of 200 emerging global talents and she also picked up the award for Best Womenswear Designer at Ukrainian Fashion Week. A regular at fashion weeks from Moscow to London, Bevza was one of the frst Ukrainian designers to be taken up by buyers in New York, Paris and Milan. It is a position that allows her to bring exposure to emerging talent – like Marsha Reva, who Bevza describes as “a real talent” who is able to think about fashion as a business.

It is the younger generation that Bevza sees as the key to unlocking Ukraine’s potential, a vanguard in which she sees herself. “Young people in Kiev are totally different from the previous generations. Education has changed and the global network has helped us to see things differently. It is very important for me to say that I am from Ukraine, I’m from Kiev, but we are shaping the city in our own image.”

“it is very important for me to say that i am from Ukraine, i’m from Kiev, but we are shaping the city in our own image” Svetlana Bevza, founder of fashion label BevZA

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Previous page: Sergey Makhno in the iNK restaurant.

Makhno designed every element from walls and lighting right down to the cutlery.

Below: leading fashion designer Svetlana Bevza. right: Kiev as viewed from the Botanical Garden

poRtRait: pashKovsKiy Roman

with different values and a different mission,” he says.

“It is important for us to reach for our own goal. And we do it not simply for big money, but for something permanent. For something great, something to impress, something to stay after us.”

This sense of the new as holding integrity is central to Makhno’s vision. Truly authentic innovation is always acknowledging the best achievements of the past. It is a sentiment refected in Makhno’s dream project, to create the biggest ceramics museum in Europe as a dynamic affrmation of Ukraine’s rich legacy. “Our ancient Trypillya culture is probably the most important in Europe,” he explains. “According to much scientifc study, this is the place where horses were domesticated for the frst time, and where people frst started to use ceramics.”

Not everything in Kiev impresses Sergey Makhno – from “trashy and corny new buildings” to the bureaucrats who approve them – but that doesn’t stop him getting excited about his home city. “There are splashes of immense talent,” he says. “These people are developing important projects – new restaurants, new buildings, some great pieces of design.” One of the latest additions is the new INK restaurant that he conceived, not merely as an interior, but as a whole experience. Taking inspiration from as far afeld as Japan and the UK, he created the name, the logo, the furniture, the lighting – even the cutlery. “It is all there, and it works,” he says. “I love to travel. But I always come back.

It’s more challenging, but more exciting to work here.”

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“We can be not just a logistical hub, but a hub for ideas from asia, europe and the Middle east” victor valeyev, iT Ukraine Association

The global connector

Lef: the range rover Sport and the 1982 People’s Friendship Arch that symbolises the friendship between russia and Ukraine. right: iT specialist victor valeyev in the corridors of the Kiev Polytechnic institute in which he studied

Hooking up to the global network has become allimportant to the innovators of Ukraine. If the world’s continents were a series of devices – laptop, desktop, tablet and smartphone – then Kiev would be its USB hub. It is the intermediary force that brings everything, from the latest start-up tech to the brightest new cultural ideas, together.

In Europe and Asia, the continents it straddles, Ukraine has been a sleeping giant for too long. It ranks as the second largest country in Europe by area, and if it entered the European Union – and aspirations for integration are huge – then it would be the sixth largest member by population. For a modern state only 22 years since independence, it has huge potential.

Ukrainians are justly proud of the fact that the frst computer ever assembled on continental Europe was built in Kiev. The city was a key player in the Soviet defence and technology industries, and Kievans are keen to make the most of their historic opportunity to act as mediator.

“Ukraine is a hub of cultures,” says Victor Valeyev, Executive Director of IT Ukraine Association and a key player in generating links between tech companies in Ukraine and the rest of the world. “We can be not just a logistical hub, but a hub for ideas from Asia, Europe and the Middle East.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that an IT specialist should be inclined towards interaction rather than isolation – computers and the internet have had perhaps more impact than any other inventions in terms of encouraging interaction and undermining isolationism.

What is perhaps more surprising for an IT man is a preoccupation with the value of the past.

“I studied here at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. I am

inspired by the place and its sense of the generations of history, the history of ideas,” says Valeyev. “I am particularly inspired by Carl Jung’s idea that we learn from our grandfathers and fathers things that help us innovate for the future. Their ideas can reveal possibilities they never imagined. The past is important as a creative space that leads to innovation.”

Born in Kiev, Valeyev has witnessed his city grow from a Soviet satellite town through two revolutions to the emerging hub he now sits in, looking out over a new business district from his offce window. He believes the key to Kiev’s success is threefold. “Firstly, Kiev has a very long history as a technological centre, part of the Byzantine legacy. It has always been a centre of education and thinking,” he explains. “Secondly, Ukraine is a country which is between two worlds – a more conservative and wealthy world of Europe and the more energetic and wild world of Asia. The third factor is mindset. To gain technological advantage in one of the most advanced industries in the world you have to be a very open-minded person. You have to be both a good analytical and creative person. Both are important. In the new IT industry, you have to be an engineer and a poet.”

Valeyev’s work is focused on bringing Ukrainian innovations into world markets, merging scientifc and industrial potential and creating conditions for greater regional development. “Our main task is to combine the research potential of Ukrainian academic institutions located in Kiev with venture businesses with money to develop, and young, practical people with brilliant ideas and energy,” he explains.

“We have set up a correspondence pavilion in Silicon Valley to facilitate interchange of experience, and we are also organising a large IT forum in Kiev,” says Valeyev. “As an association, our main task is to

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create the environment to help people make the right contacts – to fnd each other.”

Though the software revolution in Ukraine may have begun with outsourcing and start-up ideas that quickly moved abroad, as the reputation of Kiev develops, so the reasons for building on home turf do, too.

“In each area of Kiev, especially in the central districts, you will fnd at least one IT company,” Valeyev says with assurance. “Everything points to Ukraine’s historic chance to be a bridge between worlds – technologically and in every sense.”

Leading from the front Victor Pinchuk is reputedly Ukraine’s second richest man, having made a fortune in the steel industry, and he is a leading philanthropic force in the arts, education and diplomacy. In 2006, he set up the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and opened the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev to expose young Ukrainians to the best in contemporary global arts and to provide a platform for emerging local talent. And young Ukrainians are responding.

“We receive around 1,400 visitors per day, which is pretty much the capacity of the PinchukArtCentre, and the major part of our visitors are young people.

Since opening in September 2006, more than two million people have visited our exhibitions,” says Dennis Kazvan, head of communications for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

“While most global art centres fnd that the major part of their clientele are aged 60-plus, here in Ukraine it’s young people who are flling the queues. Our core audience is between 16 and 35.

They start young, admission is dennis Kazvan, victor Pinchuk Foundation free, and they are getting to see the works of top artists such as Ólafur Elíasson, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor alongside Ukrainian artists.

“Access, integration and education are our main principles,” Kazvan explains. “We work with children – from the age of four – in our education programme to help develop their creative skills. Victor Pinchuk likes to say that ‘contemporary art is one of the most revolutionary forces in the world’. And we can really see it in this country. Just 25 years ago, contemporary art as well as rock music and underground literature were forbidden and prosecuted by Soviet authorities.

Contemporary art now is a very universal language connecting people and expanding their creativity. And with national and international art prizes launched by us in 2009, we are creating a future generation of artists.”

While Kazvan and his team are plotting the takeover of Kiev by a modern generation of artists from the bird’s-eye view of the uber-chic SkyArtCafe atop the art centre, the Foundation is also implementing big ideas for Ukraine across a far wider range of sectors.

It provides hospitals across Ukraine with state-of-theart medical equipment that is vital in reversing child mortality rates. More than 20,000 babies have been saved due to unique equipment since the launch of the project. “Another main focus of our work is education,”

poRtRait: vaLya Rostovikova

“Contemporary art is one of the most revolutionary forces in the world. and we can really see it in this country”

Clockwise from top lef: the House with Chimaeras is used for ofcial ceremonies. Bevza cites this as one of her most inspiring Kiev buildings; dennis Kazvan, head of communications for the victor Pinchuk Foundation; the range rover Sport outside the Kiev Polytechnic institute

says Kazvan. “The Foundation helped to establish the Kiev School of Economics in 2006, has translated the most popular Coursera courses into Ukrainian, and offers scholarships to young Ukrainians to study at the top Ukrainian and global universities. There are more than 2,500 alumnus of our scholarships programmes – young Ukrainians who will be the future leaders and changemakers of tomorrow’s Ukraine.”

But it is the Yalta Annual Meetings organised by the Foundation and YES (Yalta European Strategy – another network founded by Victor Pinchuk) that are making the biggest impact in integrating Ukraine into a global community and looking for solutions to global challenges.

YES is held annually in Yalta, at the historic Livadia Palace where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin divided Europe in 1945. Kazvan explains: “The YES Forum, attended by leading world politicians, visionaries and businessmen, is often called the ‘boutique-Davos of Eastern Europe’.”

Cruising Kiev’s iconic Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti), negotiating the cobbled streets of the old quarter, heading out across the bridges onto the eastern fats, the pulse of the modern city is unmistakable. It is one that runs through all the innovators and pioneers we have met on our journey, and it is a thread that seems to weave throughout Kiev and its long history.

It is a pulse of connectivity. Just as the bridges of the wide Dnieper River connect east and west Kiev, so the legacy of wisdom, architectural beauty and the tenacious Kievan spirit connect the city’s past with its future. The innovations marking the city out as a pacesetter in the new Europe are all about the desire to connect, infuence, inform and transform.

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fuLL Tank, eMpTy QuaRTeR of-road racer Moi Torrallardona describes his fastest ever crossing of the arabian empty Quarter, one of the most hostile terrains on earth. His mount? a supercharged v8 Range Rover Sport

pHoTogRapHy: CoRBiS

words by Moi Torrallardona

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DRIVE

photogRaphy: dom Romney

a constantly challenging landscape including vast sand fats, sof dunes, sands with sharp rocks and epic canyons. desert driving requires a unique combination of speed, fnesse, great care and technical skill

previous page: “the Empty Quarter is one of the toughest challenges on Earth, even for specialist vehicles. To have a production-ready Range Rover Sport set this time is an incredible achievement,” says patrick Jubb, Global marketing Communications Director, Land Rover.

This page, clockwise from top lef: moi Torrallardona suits up for the challenge; moi with his co-driver; the Range Rover Sport sets a new speed record for a production-ready SuV crossing the Empty Quarter

ThE EmpTy QuaRTER, or Rub’ al Khali, is the world’s biggest sand desert, a huge forbidding expanse of weather-beaten land that occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula. Centuries ago, camel trains plied the vast sand mountains and gravelly terrain, bringing frankincense and myrrh to the markets of the Mediterranean, many weeks’ ride away. But nowadays the desert is empty. Even the Bedouin, who once lived nomadically in this barren land, have now all moved to coastal towns in search of work.

I’d long wanted to cross this vast, empty landscape, one of the most forbidding and treacherous terrains on Earth, where temperatures typically exceed 50ºC. But this just wasn’t enough. My Omani co-driver and myself decided not only to cross the Quarter, but to do so faster than anyone had ever done it before. Great driving performance and agility, after all, are key characters of the new Range Rover Sport.

There are no recognised routes across the Quarter because there are no roads or paths. For our run, we chose a course from Wadi Adda Wasir in Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates border. Our choice of route was determined by many factors. High among them was security, making Yemen off limits. We also wanted to avoid crossing international borders, which would slow us down. As Saudi Arabia occupies most of the land mass, it made sense to start and fnish our journey in this vast kingdom.

A full recce was impossible. The route was chosen by studying satellite images of the terrain, what research we could fnd, and by trying to make our path as direct as possible. Yet the terrain changes daily, as the winds blow the sand and the shapes of the dunes endlessly alter.

The vehicle was standard, including tyres and even tyre pressures. We didn’t even ft an auxiliary fuel tank.

We carried cans to refuel and there was a pre-arranged fuel stop halfway across the route. The supercharged V8 model was chosen for one simple reason: it is the fastest version. That power can also be useful clawing

your way up these vast dunes of sand, up to 300m high.

We set off at dawn on Sunday, 3 November 2013 and the goal was to fnish before dark. You do not want to cross the Empty Quarter in the dark. It’s impossible to judge the surface of the sand at night, with hazards like ditches and gullies hidden from view.

GPS navigation guided us on our chosen path, but regularly – in the middle of this vast emptiness – we would have to choose which dune to climb and which to bypass. You have to read the sand to choose the correct path to avoid the softest surfaces. The Range Rover Sport is incredibly good in sand, helped by its light body and great power.

On the whole trip we saw only one truck, travelling from an oil rig. Otherwise, we met no one. We encountered a constantly challenging landscape including vast sand fats, soft dunes, sands with sharp rocks and epic canyons. Desert driving requires a unique combination of speed, fnesse, great care and technical skill. It is crucial that you tackle the dunes with precision. Knowing the right time to go full throttle and the right time to slow down takes experience and clear judgement.

Hidden in the drift sand, we’d occasionally hit unseen ditches hard and unexpectedly. Once or twice I thought the impact would fatally damage our car, yet the Range Rover Sport never faltered. Our trickiest challenge was working through a particularly diffcult series of small dunes with sharp edges. It felt like a lifetime, and my co-driver and I had to use sand ladders and a trolley jack to extract the big 20-inch wheels from the sand that consumed them.

Finally, 10 hours and 22 minutes after leaving Wadi Adda Wasir – having covered 849km at an average speed of 81.87km/h – we arrived at our fnish line. Was I tired? Not really, the adrenaline kept me fresh. Hot and fatigued? No, the air conditioning kept us cool. This is a supremely comfortable vehicle.

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JoURneY aCRoSS THe ToP of THe WoRLd Three Range Rover Hybrids head east, via the Himalayas, en route to Mumbai, in a 16,800km extended Silk Road challenge words by Richard Bremner – photography by Nick Dimbleby

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RoaDs aRE a sImplE concEpt. Whether they are mere tracks or sprawling carpets of motorway, they are laid to enable point B to be reached from point A. But roads have histories, too, and over the centuries the reason for wanting to reach B can change. Several thousand years ago, a major reason for people in the West wanting to go east was to buy silk. That demand, and the curious topography of much of the land in between, triggered the development of a network of trails stretching from the Mediterranean to China that became known as the Silk Road. It was a signifcant spur to civilisation’s advance from the second century BC until the late 14th century.

In a mission to test the new Range Rover Hybrid, Land Rover decided to drive three of them on a journey that will retrace many of those trails, and place a few challenges under the wheels of the most capable hybrid vehicle in the world. The Silk Road is over 6,000km long, but the Range Rover vehicles will be covering more than double this distance to reach their fnal destination of Mumbai.

The journey begins at Land Rover’s Solihull birthplace, crosses the Channel to skirt France and Belgium before

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spearing across Germany at an effortless 160km/h lope that the Hybrids easily maintain despite their heavy loads.

This will be the last time the Hybrids see speed like this.

The advance slows in Poland, the roads battered enough to halve their pace, and a motorway fuel stop fnds the pumps roped off and out of use.

But the beauty of Kraków is the reward for this minor inconvenience. This royal city is rich with Gothic and Renaissance buildings, wide boulevards, a castle and a Jewish quarter. It’s a sophisticated and storied city that’s a big contrast to the terrain that the Hybrids will encounter over the next 15,000km.

After a short, uneventful drive across part of Ukraine, life livens up at the border where the customs offcers become increasingly intrigued by the Range Rover vehicles, one of them unable to resist asking for an explanation of the Hybrid’s inner workings, another astonished at the scale

Spearing across Germany at an efortless 160km/h lope that the Hybrids easily maintain despite their heavy loads

DRIVE

previous page: heading through a Kyrgyzstan valley near tash Rabat. clockwise from top lef: leaving behind Berlin’s glittering Victory column, better known by locals as Goldelse or Golden lizzy; pausing alongside a silk Route mural in Khiva, Uzbekistan; heading towards Bukhara (Buxoro is the Uzbek word for Bukhara)

of the mission. Some 780km of it are knocked off the following day with the 15-hour drive that follows a night in Lviv’s ambitiously named Grand Hotel. A claustrophobic, drenching tunnel of rain that threatens lesser cars greets us in the morning, but the Range Rovers’ ground clearance and All-Wheel Drive allow reassuringly secure progress towards Odessa.

This is a city redolent of the Cold War, although that’s easy to forget under a sun that turns this port’s Black Sea harbour a Mediterranean blue. Architecturally grand, Odessa is an uplifting contrast to the next stop Mykolaiv, whose tired, Soviet-era apartment buildings make an unpromising prospect for a lunchtime forage.

Further down the road, the produce of some roadside stalls curtained with rows of dried fsh, inspires a picnic lunch on a beach in one of the Crimea’s many wild bays. The post-picnic destination is seaside Yalta, site of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin’s world-shaping conference, and the advance into Russia is achieved by unexpected means, squeezing the vehicles onto an ancient car ferry to make the 20-minute voyage.

It was the relative absence of obstacles that fuelled the Silk Road’s emergence over 2,000 years ago. The incentive to travel was China’s highly desired silk, and the means of getting to it was eased by the vast, grassy Asian steppes that our Hybrid convoy is heading for.

The steppes allowed passage without the hostilityprovoking risk of trespassing on farm property, these vast, grassy transit zones also providing food for the burdened beasts that trudged them. Eventually, the Silk Road’s travellers’ journeys would spread from the Pacifc to the Mediterranean and even into Africa as protection from the Mongol Empire aided trade. The web of routes, often followed by camel trains of 400 animals, played host to roving pilgrims, monks, traders, soldiers, urban dwellers and nomads, and in time technologies, religions and philosophies were exchanged as well as silk, spices, precious stones and even exotic animals. The trail became an early example of cultural integration. Less convenient, however, was its role as a carrier of bubonic plague. This is a risk that the convoy is unlikely to face as it travels through Russia’s grasslands. Even today these

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Driving across a plateau high in Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk Kul Province at dawn

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are sparsely populated, no settlement evident for miles until the odd solitary cottage, signalled by barking dogs and hissing geese, inexplicably appears.

The convoy slices across a corner of Russia and Kazakhstan’s south-west corner into Uzbekistan. This country provides rather more drama, starting with the ecological tragedy of what was once the world’s fourth largest lake. The Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s and is now a tenth of its original size.

And although the water level is gradually rising again, vast, beached ships litter the area as if they had been dropped from the sky.

Shortly afterwards we see a sea of desert having overwhelmed most of the 50 ancient fortresses of ElliqQala, submerging them beneath oozing sands to leave eight behind. So the beauty of Bukhara, an oasis town that dates back to the sixth century and was once the intellectual centre of Islam, feels like a glamorously alien beacon of life after the desolation of the Aral. These days it’s tourists that are drawn to this romantic city of bluedomed mosques, minarets and dramatically fortifed walls.

A few hour’s drive away, Samarkand, an equally important Silk Road city, is at least as compelling, as underlined by its World Heritage status. The green, fertile felds that follow on the road to Tashkent provide contrast to the epic desert scenery recently travelled through.

Departing the Soviet-favoured Tashkent – it was almost completely rebuilt in Five-Year Plan style following a devastating 1966 earthquake – takes the convoy into Uzbekistan’s easily cruised farmlands and towards one of the silk-producing cities that gave this ancient road its name – Margilan.

The city, which according to legend was founded by Alexander the Great, has been making silk for many centuries and a huge, modern factory sits near another that still creates the cloth by the ancient methods.

Cocoons of worms are boiled to release the silk strands to the rhythmic clacking of treadling looms, but the sound of the traditionally dressed women’s work echoes through a semi-dormant factory, as many looms are mostly idle.

Thoughts of the Silk Road’s often intriguing evolution will be banished by the challenges of the forbidding Fergana Mountains, and before that a particularly zealous Range Rover inspection at the border crossing between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Fascinated by the lives of these foreigners and their journey, customs offcials inspect everything we’re carrying – supplies, medicines and tools – and spend time looking at all the pictures

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from our travels before we can make the border crossing and head towards the biggest challenge yet.

The extreme altitudes of Tibet are where the Range Rover Hybrids venture into a technical unknown. They’ve been tested at altitude before, but this drive will push them into the thinning air at 5,000m, the reduced atmospheric pressure challenging engines and cooling systems. And the Land Rovers’ occupants, too. At sea level, 21 per cent of the air we breathe is oxygen, but above 5,000m this falls to just 10 per cent. The team’s medic, Emile Waite-Taylor, has a portable pressure chamber that simulates lower altitudes for a couple of hours, and oxygen canisters with breathing masks.

Within two hours we reach 5,200m. Much of the route is on tarmac roads that run parallel to the Himalayas, the serrated white peak of 7,680m Nandi Devi soaring magnifcently into a brilliant blue sky. The awesome calm of this scene is a contrast to the condition of the convoy. More than a third of the 14-strong group suffer headaches, and two need bursts of oxygen. But the Hybrids reveal an advantage, their electric motors able to counter the effciency-diminishing effects of high altitude faced by every internal combustion engine.

After the light-headed experience of high altitude, the drive through beautiful Nepal is a doddle. And that’s despite the regular onslaught of the oncoming trucks that are the noisy, colourful travellers of the Silk Road in this region.

Driving in Nepal is merely a primer to the experience of driving in India once we have crossed the border at Mahendranagar. This is an exhilarating drive of a different kind, and the Hybrids have no trouble with the thumping potholes, the endless shuffing of gears, the braking and the electric motor-smoothed acceleration.

When Mumbai arrives, the welcome party greets an emotional crew, a few of whom have completed the entire 16,853km trip. There’s a band, beer and bad dancing.

And later, a calculation revealing that these heavily laden, hard-driven Hybrids have returned an impressive 15.5-15.7 km/l (36-37mpg).

For the engineers, there’s also the considerable satisfaction of confrming that the Range Rover Hybrid is as robustly tough as any other Land Rover, it’s a magnifcent off-roader and will be ready to take on any challenge an owner can fnd for it. Including shopping for silk.

The extreme altitudes of Tibet are where the Range Rover Hybrids venture into a technical unknown

DRIVE

Clockwise from top lef: silk-based carpets from Uzbekistan, the country was one of the earliest producers of silk, afer China; father and son in Dehqon Bozori market in Margilan; the expedition took three days to cross Kyrgyzstan’s spectacular Fergana Mountains

Land RoveR oneLife / 73

The engineer’s drive

How do you create an SUV hybrid with enhanced capability? Ask Nick Rogers, Range Rover vehicle line director, responsible for developing the Diesel Hybrid

Hybrid versions were planned at the very beginning.

We made sure the new architecture of the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport were ideally suited to hybrids.

We packaged the batteries beneath the vehicle without any compromise to the practicality or capability. So there was no reduction in the boot space or passenger space.

Ground clearance is also the same.

The batteries live in a controlled environment. They’re in a cocooned compartment, temperature controlled for optimum performance. This pod also has a boron steel plate underneath, so it’s very strong.

It takes a lot of engineering work to make hybrids good off-road. Hybrids have extra electronics and extra batteries, so – on the face of it – they’re not ideally suited to perform in rough conditions or when wading through rivers. Other manufacturers of SUV hybrids simply choose not to do all that work. Off-road performance and all-terrain capability are not core to their values. They are absolutely core to ours.

Working for Land Rover gives me licence to do things that other manufacturers wouldn’t even consider.

That’s one thing I love about my job and gets me out of bed every morning. To make vehicles that “can go anywhere” is a tremendous challenge.

The Silk Trail was a great test for our new Diesel Hybrid. What better way to prove that it’s a proper uncompromised Range Rover than to send three prototypes on a tough overland route and complete the 16,800km journey without a single problem?

The Diesel Hybrid can do everything that normal hybrids can do – and it can do everything that a Range Rover can do.

In some ways, capability is enhanced. The electric engine produces maximum torque immediately, so when a delicate throttle is needed on slippery surfaces, it can enhance the driver’s ability to creep forward gently.

The acceleration in-gear is also amazing. If you’re following a vehicle and you want to overtake it, you’ll get the full beneft of the V6 turbodiesel and the extra 35kW of the electric engine that seamlessly provide extra torque and punch. The Diesel Hybrid has V8 turbodiesel performance, but better economy than the V6.

Hybrids are ideally suited to urban work. The Silk Trail was a great way for us to prove the capability of the Diesel Hybrid, but its biggest single advantage over a “normal” diesel or petrol – improved fuel economy and therefore lower CO2 emissions – will be most evident in town, in stop-start driving and gentle coasting.

The Range Rover Diesel Hybrids ease through the Issyk Kul Province en route to Naryn Province, Kyrgyzstan 74 / LAND RoVeR oNeLife

“at land rover our purpose is to help you make more of your world with confdence. We challenge ourselves to stay true to that spirit every day�

Phil PoPham, GrouP marketinG Director, JaGuar lanD rover