There is an old warehouse called as "Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse" in the harbor town of Tokyo Bay, which has history over 100 years old. Taking advantage of the old-fashioned atmosphere, the interior of the building is refurbished into a stylish restaurants and variety stores, and now it has even became a top class sightseeing spot in Yokohama. In May, outdoor event "LE VOLANT Cars Meet 2018" was held in the courtyard of this red brick warehouse especially for its fans. Under the blue sky, Mitsubishi Motors has carried out an interesting test-drive of many dream cars ranged from luxury brands such as Bentley, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin to Toyota "2000 GT" which was one of the famous car in history.
Steep slope of 45 degrees, the demonstration of rough road drive with one side wheel floating
Of course, there is not any steep slope and sloped road in port city Yokohama which only has flat landform. A mountain form is built artificially by using the equipment. The demonstration including climbing the stair shaped road, crossing the road by floating one side wheel, and the most attractive stunt will be climbing the 45 degree slope. All these three demonstrations can be experienced by the attendees with the car drove by professional drivers, including Mr. Hiroshi Masuoka who was victory in the overall standing of Paris Dakar Rally. There were a lot of fans gathered at the test driving area to watch the test drive.
The test car was a compact SUV car, "Eclipse Cross" and a minivan "Delica D5" that can be driven on off-road. However the Eclipse Cross was the car model attracting attention as it is the model which just released this year. It is a completely new SUV model that equipped with a turbo engine and an advanced four-wheel drive mechanism in a short full-length stylish body.
It has easily surpassed all the harsh obstacles, and gained the cheers from the passenger
The first performance was the performance where the car climbing up the stair shaped road. The obstacle starts with the stepping up stair road, followed with the step down slope. If there is not enough distance between the bottom of car and floor, the bottom of car will touch the floor. However, Eclipse Cross had crossed without any contact with floor.
It is strong enough even with only three wheels
The second stage is to cross a sloped road while one side of the rear wheel floating. There are some cases that a four wheel car couldn’t run properly on a sloped road due to the power drop when it runs with only three wheels. However, Eclipse Cross is equipped with a mechanism called "S-AWC" that could optimally controls the driving force of each of the three remaining wheels without rotating the floating wheel, to keep the car run smoothly.
The last stage is the steep slope with 45 degrees. A car cannot climb the 45 degrees if it is lack of any feature including the high engine power which manage to drive the heavy car body, appropriateness of distribution of force to both front and rear tires, and the low gravity weight to avoid the lifting up of the front part of car. Eclipse Cross has proved it by easily climbed the 45 degree steep slope with four passengers.
Moreover, this 45 degrees slope stage could allow the passengers to experience viewing the sky from the front window, which one can rarely experience it. As such, those passengers who were in car were cheered loudly, “It’s amazing!”.
Eclipse Cross, which has such a high running performance, seems to have the potential to be driven smoothly in harsh natural environments such as unpaved roads which always found in the tropical rain forest of Southeast Asia, China inland, and desert in South Asia, etc.
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