The long-distance specialist Rainer Zietlow and his team are among the guests of honour at the world premiere of the third generation Volkswagen Touareg in Beijing this week. The adventurer and his companions drove to the world premiere in Beijing over land in a camouflaged prototype of the new Volkswagen Touareg. The team spent a total of 21 days on the “Bratislava2Beijing” tour.

“The new Touareg with its numerous driver assistance systems proved to be an absolutely reliable and comfortable car on this world premiere drive”, says Rainer Zietlow. “The new Volkswagen SUV is absolutely suitable in every respect for long distances and impressed us in unpredictable road and weather conditions.”

For three weeks Zietlow and his team drove the new Touareg through eleven countries: Slovakia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China.

The starting point was the Volkswagen plant in Bratislava, where the Touareg has been manufactured for 16 years. Almost one million units have rolled off the production line since the start of series production in 2002.

Zietlow and his team drove the new Touareg through wintry Europe and deep-frozen parts of Asia. There were daily stages of in some cases more than 1,000 kilometres long and temperature ranges of minus 23 to plus 21 degrees Celsius.

The journey to the world premiere in Beijing took them along the snow-covered Urals, past frozen Lake Baikal through the expanses of Kazakhstan, the mountains and steppes of Mongolia and finally over Inner Mongolia to the Middle Kingdom. So far Rainer Zietlow has driven a Touareg along the “Panamericana” from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in eleven days and 17 hours, from Melbourne to St. Petersburg (“Russtralia”) in 17 days and eleven hours, from South Africa to Norway (“Cape to Cape 2.0”) in nine days and four hours and from Magadan (Eastern Russia) to Lisbon in six days and nine hours.