(Bloomberg) -- At some point last week on a hill inside a chopped-up 911, when all I could see through the dusty windshield was blue sky, I started to really question Porsche.

Here I was in the California outback driving a Frankenstein machine on a rudimentary course of boulders, gullies and that rude aforementioned incline leaving me perched atop a hairpin turn unable to see just where on the dirt path I should set its enormous knobby tires.

A manufacturer handing over the keys to a one-of-a-kind rock crawler and waving goodbye is rare when it comes to car criticism. That sort of thing opens automakers up to a world of nitpicking about the product they’ve spent years—and a lot of money—creating. Emotions tend to run high.

But Porsche Automobil Holding SE, apparently, trusted this creation. The scrappy coupe that had me hinged sky-high started life as a 911 Carrera 4S but now sported an onboard oxygen system, acrylic windows and a hydraulic hand brake. Its carbon fiber-reinforced plastic doors had been ripped off a 911 GT3 R; the windshield was stripped from a 911 GT3 Cup car. Myriad chassis alterations included a special axle articulation Porsche first developed for the 919 Le Mans Prototype 1 (LMP1) race car it used in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Altitude testing on its 443-horsepower six-cylinder engine had commenced in a derelict chamber Porsche used to test aircraft engines in the 1970s.

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The monster even had a name: Edith, after the French chanteuse Edith Piaf. She had recently arrived from Chile, where under the command of Frenchman Romain Dumas, she climbed to 22,093 feet (6,734 meters) above sea level. It was a world record for the highest peak reached by any earthbound vehicle to date.

I, wedged into her single bucket seat on a scruffy hillside outside Malibu, California, was the first journalist in the world to drive her.

Extreme Climber

Edith is not like the Porsche 911 Dakar you can buy for $220,000 nor like those $600,000 Baja builds from Tuthill Porsche and TJ Russell, all of which are made for high-speed blasts over flat, dusty terrain. For one thing, she’s not for sale. For another, Edith, with her sawed-off wheel arches and roll cage, may look like she belongs in Mad Max, but she’s no speed demon.

The car’s seven manual gears are set for maximum control over big rocks and precarious knolls, which means their ratios are so reduced that it took me no more than a second to need to shift from first gear to second when I rolled onto the trail. I soon hit third gear as I roared up one narrow path aimed, from what I could gather, toward the ocean and glanced down at the speedo: a whopping 20 mph. Max speed is about 60 mph. Desert sprinter she’s not.

Conceived in 2019 as a way to grab another record for the Porsche archives, Edith conquered Chile’s Ojos del Salado volcano on Dec. 2, but there had been prior attempts. Porsche ran a similar modified 911 called Doris up the mountain in 2020; Edith had been up once before in 2022. More than 6,800 feet higher at its top than the summit of Mont Blanc, Ojos del Salado is a well-known destination for automotive altitude testing. (The previous altitude record was set there in 2020, by a pair of Mercedes-Benz Unimogs.) Porsche’s trip required precise timing to avoid inclement weather and ice buildup; the air at altitude was only about half as dense as at sea level, effectively halving the power to Edith’s engine, while temperatures hovered around 20F below freezing.

No independent third party has yet certified the feat, a Porsche spokesperson confirms; the company is working with Guinness World Records to do it retroactively, as it was neither safe nor practical to have a Guinness representative on-site during the attempt, the spokesperson says. The potential for frostbite, altitude sickness, injury or simply falling into a crevasse rose “exponentially” for each additional person on the expedition, the spokesperson says, so the crew was kept to a minimum.

All told, 14 engineers, medics and mountain guides spent three weeks in Chile preparing for the ascent. Twenty-five miles from base camp, only Dumas and five others, who hiked up, made the final push. The car ran on a synthetic fuel made from water and carbon dioxide. Porsche has invested $75 million in HIF “e-fuels” as a strategy to power internal-combustion cars even if gasoline becomes unavailable. The pilot plant to produce the synthetic fuel, in Punta Arenas, Chile, started production in 2022.

The record is admirable, but as I wound my way through the dirt, I wondered why Porsche wouldn’t do something a little more, er, relevant with its Franken-baby. Remote mountaintops look dramatic in marketing campaigns, but publicly beating other automakers at the wild King of the Hammers race in California or the epic Baja 1000 in Mexico would be the bold statement proving Porsche’s ultimate prowess against real-world competition. The company has entered adventure races since its inception in 1931; I can’t be the only person who would love to see that happen again.

Competing Against Myself 

Back in Malibu, Chile’s alpine cold seemed worlds away. I was getting hot. Edith’s carpetless insides were a steel box around me, stripped bare except for a rat’s nest of wires, computer screens and the red webbed harness digging into my shoulders as we—Edith and I—wriggled through the scrub.

It didn’t help that while winding down the back side of the slope, I missed the entry point on one tight decreasing radius left turn. Slowly, slowly, I shifted into reverse and backed up the car enough so I could attack the turn at a better angle. Call me high-maintenance, but I preferred to avoid going inadvertently off-piste.

Porsche’s decision to put a manual transmission into the car struck me as rather unusual, because even extreme machines such as Formula One cars and consumer-friendly heavies like Jeep Wranglers and Ford Broncos all use complex automatic shifting. But “you get a very good and direct feel with the clutch on very steep terrain,” says Sven Schaarschmidt, a Porsche chassis expert who developed the car and traveled with it to Chile.

Fine.

My left leg got a minor workout pressing the clutch to shift between second and third gears, and then shifting down to first gear as I rolled down in a controlled descent toward the course exit. I’m pretty sure no other Porsche has ever made that amount of clanging, knocking and scraping as it advanced—especially without inflicting crippling anxiety on anyone within earshot.

As I unstrapped myself from her confines and rolled outside, it occurred to me that there was some sort of Zen lesson to be learned from my time with Edith. Toward the end of the course, I’d realized that the less I “drove” her, the better she did. I didn’t need to be shifting all over the place or be too heavy-handed on the steering wheel and brakes. Trust the mechanics, trust the engineering, and keep the thing on the trail.

Simple.

Edith proved billy goat nimble and as rugged as a rhino. Now, if only we could get her to a starting line.

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