Land Rover Range Rover Velar Interior

Land Rover Range Rover Velar Interior

If you think the Velar looks like a show car from the outside, you should see inside it.

Again, it’s a natural, logical progression from other Range Rovers, but one that has resulted in one of the most striking interiors to step out of a British car factory.

In HSE specification, you get practically all you see here as standard, bar a £930 head-up display and £2225 of rear-seat entertainment, and we’d probably live without both.

Certainly, you won’t feel short-changed when it comes to screens to look at. There’s a fully digitised instrument panel, with two touchscreens, on the centre console, whose graphical resolution and functionality mark serious improvements on those used on other JLR models.

The Velar gets a multimedia system all new to Jaguar Land Rover and it’s finally one that should fear nothing offered by any rival.

Key to it is its intuitiveness. Granted, there are a few idiosyncracies, but once you’re attuned to its ways, it’s as straightforward as you’ll find in, say, a Mercedes-Benz.

The lower screen is too low for our preference. But at least it deals with the controls you’re likely to use less often and can repurpose the two rotary dials for the heat control as assistants to other functions — to change the drive mode or the heated-seat strength, for example.

But away from the touchscreen modes, the system’s crowning glory are steering wheel buttons that can also be repurposed.

Rotate your finger slowly around the left-side roundel’s edge, for example, and you’ll turn up the volume.

But push the middle of it and that roundel’s graphics change and it becomes a way to scroll through functions displayed on the instrument panel — all while your hands stay on the wheel and your eyes not far from the road.

If there is a downside to them, mind, it’s that they both show up fingermarks and, along with the big slab of metalised plastic on the transmission tunnel, plus the glossy plastics that surround it, they reflect sunlight badly.

With a more steeply raked screen than is typical in a Range Rover, yet a relatively low window line that is a trademark of the brand, lots of light gets in here and an unreasonable amount of it ends up in your eyes.

Better, then, are the other leathers, plastics and metals that adorn the upper section of the cabin, where you’ll find big, electrically adjustable, heated chairs in the front, from where it’s easy to set up a relaxed driving position, tall if less commanding than in a big Range Rover, or a Sport.

There’s plentiful oddments storage, too, and although rear leg room is not much more than adequate in this class (in truth, adults can sit comfortably behind adults, and how much air do you need in front of your knees?), the payback is that the boot is notably bigger than in most rivals. by Autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Velar Design & Styling

Land Rover Range Rover Velar Design & Styling

Our Velar arrived in HSE trim, which a lot of buyers will consider a minimum requirement for a car that looks like it has not long stepped off of a motor show stand.

HSE brings you the 21in wheels that would have seemed ludicrously large just a few years ago but fit the Velar’s concept-like looks to a tee.

Car makers talk about identities and design languages: the Velar looks like the ultimate and most successful interpretation of how much more dynamic Range Rover has been trying to make its range. It feels like the zenith; as if Range Rovers hereafter will need a new set of guidelines.

Beneath the skin, the Velar is an entirely logical extension of the Range Rover line-up: more rugged than an Evoque, but less so than the Sport or full-fat Range Rover.

Put simply, the mostly aluminium monocoque it sits on is the same as the F-Pace’s. There’s a longitudinal engine in the front – we’ll come back to that – driving through a ZF eight-speed gearbox to all four wheels.

Predominantly, the driveline is the same as in Jaguars: it’s a rear-drive car first and foremost, with a clutch at the gearbox that can push power to the front wheels as and when necessary. Which, in a car like a Range Rover, is a lot more than it ought to be necessary in ‘lesser’ off-roaders.

There’s no low-ratio gearbox, but there is respectable ground clearance, approach and departure angles and wade depth, particularly on the optional air suspension this car has fitted.

All of those numbers are worse than full-sized Range Rovers but also superior to any other car in this sector.

What you won’t find on a big Range Rover, mind, but you will here is a four-cylinder diesel engine from the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR)Ingenium line-up.

Yes, it makes 237bhp and 369lb ft, which is impressive for a 2.0-litre engine; but, at 2089kg, the Velar is a heavy car for a 2.0-litre engine. We’ll see how it fares in a moment. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Velar Performance

Land Rover Range Rover Velar Performance

To the first really tricky question the Velar must answer, then: does a four-cylinder diesel engine have any place in a £64,000 Range Rover?

To be fair to Land Rover, this isn’t the first luxury SUV priced in excess of £50,000 to rely on such an engine – and, in the future, we can expect a growing proportion of luxury cars, whose antecedents probably had richer powerplants with more cylinders, to adopt similar ones.

But, here and now, does this engine do this car the kind of service needed to really distinguish the Velar?

Cue the awkward silence. In some ways, JLR’s higher-output Ingenium diesel just about earns its place in the car, but in others, it falls quite a long way short.

The 237bhp motor is certainly quieter and better isolated from the cabin in the Velar than it is in an F-Pace.

It’s still a four-cylinder diesel, mind, and is inherently less smooth and hushed than the six-cylinder diesel is. But, overall, it does a respectable job on refinement, being a little bit vocal when cold and when revving hard, but never really disturbing the car’s occupants.

Less respectable is the Velar’s outright performance level. Compared with what else your money might have bought, it’s actually downright poor.

After several sets of attempts using different drive modes and transmission settings, the car recorded a 9.3sec 0-60mph two-way average, which is fully 2.5sec shy of Land Rover’s claim for it – and an even greater distance behind what we saw from an Audi Q7 3.0 TDI. For a new car to miss one of its key performance claims by so much is very rare.

We’re prepared to accept that luxury SUV buyers may not be buying this particular Velar for its outright pace, of course, but they’re likely to notice the slightly sluggish, unresponsive impression that the car’s engine and transmission conjure whether they’re concentrating on it or not.

At step-off and when given a cue to kick down, the Velar’s powertrain, although smooth, tends to make you wait longer than you’d like before it winds into meaningful action. And although it revs fairly willingly for a four-pot oil-burner, it never chimes in with the really forceful slug of torque that you might want for assured overtaking, towing or light off-roading, either.

On fuel economy, the Velar D240 gives a more competitive account of itself.

On our touring economy test, it returned 48.2mpg, which, from a two-tonne SUV like this, is not to be sniffed at.

But you do need to be prepared to adopt a fairly sedate rate and style of progress to see that kind of return – and the Velar’s engine and gearbox certainly do sedate much better than they do brisk. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Velar Review

Land Rover Range Rover Velar Review

Semi-skimmed is how we’ve previously characterised the new Range Rover Velar.

Mid-sized is how Land Rover prefers it, the model filling out the obvious white space between the decidedly compact Evoque and the comfortably large Range Rover Sport.

But our preferred description refers to more than just the Velar’s dimensions. Unlike its full-sized siblings, the fourth addition to the Range Rover line-up is the product of something other than Gaydon’s full-fat approach to SUVs. Because this new Range Rover is unequivocally car-based.

Its predominately aluminium platform is the same architecture used by the latest Jaguar XE and XF.

The F-Pace is an even closer blood relative, despite starting at £10,000 less than the Velar.

Naturally, four-wheel drive and Land Rover’s Terrain Response system are both standard, even at the base of the line-up – but so, too, are four-cylinder engines, coil suspension and an usually low ride height for a Range Rover.

In this garb, perhaps even more so than the stoutly mechanical Evoque, the Velar smacks of a modern, immodestly expensive crossover – the kind of car many would describe as the antithesis of Land Rover’s usual off-road-capability-centric modus operandi.

Taking a view on the philosophy behind the Velar, and where it leaves Gaydon, will be one objective of this road test.

At the outset, it’s merely possible to acknowledge a few home truths: the Velar plainly looks the part, can be had with comparatively economical Ingenium engines and can also be bought in entry-level trim from around £15,000 less than a Range Rover Sport.

Taken without any additional context, those facts alone ought to guarantee the kind of feverish new-buyer interest that the Evoque generated in 2011.

Whether or not that level of attention is actually deserved on a fitness-for-purpose basis will be the second objective of this road test. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Range Rover Velar vs Porsche Cayenne vs Audi Q7: Luxury SUV Mega Test

Range Rover Velar vs Porsche Cayenne vs Audi Q7: Luxury SUV Mega Test

Range Rover Velar vs Porsche Cayenne vs Audi Q7: Luxury SUV Mega Test

The defining sound
 of this year’s most-wanted luxury car, the new Range Rover Velar, isn’t generated by its multi-cylinder diesel engine, some clever active exhaust or even 
its 17-speaker audio system.

It’s the rhythmic sequence of gentle whirrs and puffs made by the car’s pillowy, beautifully upholstered ‘massager’ driver’s seat as it sets about discreetly but determinedly kneading the tension out of your lower back.

It’s a sound you can hear because the noise of the car’s V6 motor descends to a barely audible background hum at a motorway cruise – and also because there’s little more than the faintest flutter of wind noise creeping around the door seals at that speed. And what 
it sounds like – honestly – is a polite but persistent case of robotic after-dinner flatulence. It is not quite silent and a little bit violent at times, but thankfully unaccompanied by any lingering odour. Nope – the pseudo-farts of the new Velar’s driver’s seat don’t actually smell of anything; but that may even be a missed opportunity when you consider they might have been so deliciously perfumed.

And so, having had the glare of
 a full Autocar road test on it and some stinging criticism made of it 
in lower-end four-cylinder diesel form, the Velar gets a chance to reveal what it’s really all about.
 Our focus turns to the near-top-of-the-range six-cylinder diesel model. If this is the outstanding modern luxury SUV that Gaydon claims it is, so accomplished in
 all the ways it’s purported to
 be, then it should easily prove itself superior to a couple of other similarly priced SUV rivals.

What rivals, though. For the £70,530 of our Velar R-Dynamic HSE D300 test car, you can have a Porsche Cayenne S Diesel and a little bit of change or an Audi Q7 3.0 TDI 272 quattro S line and quite a lot more change. You could have a Maserati Levante Diesel also – although Maserati wouldn’t lend us one 
of those for this comparison.

But even without the Italian,
 these are opponents that vividly demonstrate why this magazine’s voice has been one of many to remark on the ambitiousness of Land Rover’s Velar pricing. The Porsche offers more cylinders, more power, more torque and more performance from its 380bhp V8 diesel, as well as a lasting reputation within the luxury SUV set for sporting handling.

The Audi, on the other hand, matches the Range Rover’s claims on acceleration and beats the other two on fuel economy and CO2 emissions, combining the usefulness of seven seats with an outstandingly classy and well-finished interior and one of the most refined SUV-class driving experiences you can currently 
buy for any price.

So, can this superbly handsome new Range Rover prove it’s got the substance to match its evident style and bring home a couple of big SUV scalps? Or will it wilt in the face of the competition that Gaydon has chosen for it?

Value in the Velar?
Seventy grand. We keep coming back to it but it’s obvious why: because 
it seems an awfully high price for a Land Rover that’s supposed to sit below the Range Rover Sport in Land Rover’s showroom model range. That’ll be the Range Rover Sport that, in what you might consider as-close-as-possible-to-matching 3.0-litre SDV6 HSE Dynamic spec, costs £1400 less than our Velar test car on Land Rover’s current price list.

And yet, if it could, Land Rover might interject here and point out that this Velar isn’t expensive as much as high-end: lavishly appointed and generally dressed to impress. And, if you buy a six-cylinder HSE at any rate, there’s a certain amount of credibility to that claim.
 The Audi we’re comparing it with here might look like it’s £14,000 cheaper in upper-trim S line form but it doesn’t come with half of
 what the Velar’s giving. Matrix
 LED headlights; 21in alloy wheels; leather upholstery extended to the doors, dashboard and centre console; air suspension; memory seats; adaptive digital instruments; keyless operation; and a full suite of active safety systems - all come on the Velar R-Dynamic HSE D300 as standard and all are cost options on the Q7.

And guess what? Equipped to the same level, order would be restored: the Audi would cost more than the Range Rover – just as it should, you might argue, being a longer, larger, full-size seven-seater SUV.

The Porsche would cost quite a
 lot more. A set of 21in alloy wheels, some memory sports seats and a full leather interior take the Cayenne’s price beyond that of the Range Rover all on their own – and that's without air suspension, LED headlights, a premium audio system or even a DAB radio being on the car’s spec sheet.

Suddenly, the Velar’s sticker price, while still a long way from a bargain, doesn’t seem quite so exorbitant.

We’ll call that surprise number one. Surprise number two materialises when you finally get the chance to clamber into the Velar’s interior, take in your surroundings and then clamber back out again to assess how the Q7 and Cayenne compare.

You expect the Audi to land some telling blows here: to be significantly more spacious than the Range Rover, as well as to seem a cut above on technological sophistication and material quality. That is, after all, how German and British luxury cars tend to relate to each other.
 But, while it is roomier than the Velar, the Q7 isn’t necessarily
 the more comfortable car of the two. The Audi’s got a fair bit more second-row leg room than the Range Rover, granted. But it’s the Velar that has the more comfortable driver’s seat and the marginally more laid-back driving position. In the back of the British car, while a 6ft 4in bloke like me has to sit with his thighs splayed in order to ‘sit behind himself ' and avoid the seatback in front
 of his knees, there’s still plenty of head room and a more agreeable seat to relax in than you’ll find elsewhere. The Audi’s rear chairs seem a bit flat and narrow by comparison.

The Cayenne, meanwhile, offers more second-row leg room than the Velar, too, but more limited head room and elbow room. Its back seats are more deeply sculpted: good for two passengers but not much fun, I suspect, for a third.

Moving on to luxury-car ambience, it’s another mixed showing for the Audi. It's an area where you think the Velar could come up short - and yet it doesn’t. The integrity and baseline quality of the Q7’s interior is absolutely spectacular. The granite-like substance of some of its fittings just amazes you. The chromed centre console trim of our test car seemed more securely fixed than my kitchen worktops. Most of all, it’s the consistency of the finish – the lack of absolutely anything that stands out as even a little bit flimsy, rough, hard or unattractive – that really distinguishes this car.

And yet, while it’s evidently very smart and very, very solid, there’s
 a relative shortage of richness in evidence from the Q7, which the Range Rover’s airy, tactile, supremely stylish interior makes very plain indeed. For this test, Audi sent us a lowly equipped Q7 whose moulded dashboard, dark leathers and
 chrome decorative trims simply didn’t produce the same enveloping bubble of lavishness as the Velar’s hide-upholstered panels and its various shades of oyster, ebony
 and ash veneer.

With a more generously kitted Q7, the comparison would have been fairer – but, when all you can do is test the cars in front of you on the day, the Q7 felt like a business tool. The Velar felt like it was ready to transport you to somewhere much more special than the office.

The Cayenne’s interior doesn’t really bear comparison with either the Velar’s or the Q7’s – it’s perfectly comfortable and would seem very nice in isolation but it otherwise looks and feels like the cabin of a six-year-old car, whose third-generation replacement was unveiled to the world on the very day this test was carried out.

But then the Cayenne earns its place in this test for altogether different reasons. The honest, deep, menacing chug of its V8 diesel engine, and the understated but obvious vibration it sends through the pedals and steering column, hint at the first reason the instant you start it up. The Cayenne’s a freak – but an enormously likeable one. It disregards much of the luxury SUV rulebook, being noisier than the norm, as well as coarser, weightier, more demanding and less well-mannered in the operation of its transmission and controls. But, fully 15 years after the introduction of the original Cayenne, this car remains singularly appealing among its rivals as a driver’s car – and I include the Velar among them. No other large SUV, save perhaps a Range Rover Sport SVR, is so fast, balanced, agile and entertaining on the road that it could stand in well for 
a rear-driven super-saloon, if life dictated a need to swap one for the other.

So no – if you’re wondering, this new Velar isn’t as absorbing to drive as Porsche’s original go-faster 4x4. But it is much more suited to the purposes and particulars of a luxury SUV’s dynamic brief than the Cayenne. And, in its own more cossetting, compromising way, the Velar’s is a similarly enjoyable drive.

Don’t think, for a moment, that 516lb ft under your right peg in the Range Rover will feel anything like as potent as the 627lb ft the Porsche serves up. Five-hundred-odd lb ft
 is plenty, mind you: enough that 
the Velar D300 suffers none of the sluggishness that we encountered in the cheaper D240.

On the road, the Range Rover combines low-range muscle, throttle response, flexibility and silken operating smoothness very cleverly indeed. Its eight-speed auto ’box seems to know exactly how much slippage – and how fast a shift – is conducive to quickening pace while maintaining comfort levels.

The Cayenne, on the other hand, isn’t concerned with comfort levels; its transmission hustles up and down the cogs with the relative finesse of a Formula Ford racer on a qualifying lap. That V8 takes a split-second longer to gird its loins when you want full power, but then the Porsche takes off at a rate, and in a style, that few would have believed possible 
for any diesel passenger car 25 years ago, let alone an SUV.

The Velar’s steering is expertly weighted and paced – it’s matched
 to the car’s true handling response and roll rate as cleverly as a horsehair bow to a steel violin string.

The car has Comfort, Automatic and Dynamic road-going settings
 for its active air suspension, but all of them leave it with ride and handling that meet the need for bump compliance, good body control and lasting grip levels in a wonderfully progressive, supple way. The Velar glides over the road just as you want a luxury SUV to, but never seems out of touch with it.

There is even more outright lateral grip, a more poised and adjustable cornering attitude and more driver reward on offer in the Cayenne, sure – but it comes at a cost. The weight of that engine in an already heavy car makes for steering that’s over-assisted at times and so straight-line stability isn’t as high in the Cayenne as it is in the Range Rover and there's only a transient, illusive kind of contact patch feel. The car’s ride is never ideal: absorptive but under-damped in Comfort, becoming a bit wooden and tetchy in Sport – and always a touch thumpy.

This, to be frank, isn’t how most luxury SUV drivers would want their car to conduct itself on the road – but, golly, could they have fun with it if they were brave enough. This is a 2.2-tonne 4x4 with power-on oversteer available on demand; ridiculous, but true.

The way the Cayenne grips and stays neutral though the heart of a bend, and then arcs into a powerslide as you feed in all that torque, suggests it’s not an SUV at all, but instead a sports car with a transaxle ’box and no forward driveshafts.

And where’s the Q7 in all this? Busy doing its best to keep its engine and cabin quiet, to filter every corrupting influence from its controls and to stay stable and reassuring in everything. And by succeeding at all of that, offering scant reply to the differing kinds of dynamic excellence of its rivals.

But, to be honest, though impressed by the car’s mechanical refinement and sense of isolation, I expected 
a much more settled ride from the Audi, which isn’t a car that takes well to an uneven road on its standard steel coil ‘dynamic’ suspension. Here, as before, we were denied the opportunity for the fairest of tests by Audi’s particular test car – although previous experience suggests that, even on optional air springs and with all of Audi’s mechanical suspension and driveline augmentations fitted, the Q7 may not quite have hit the perfect compromise of the Velar.

And so it is that our winner makes itself known. After a shaky start
on these pages, and recovering
 from the considerable handicap that a glaringly ambitious value proposition puts on any new car, the Range Rover Velar sees off opposition that many would imagine belong beyond its orbit. An Audi Q7 3.0 TDI just hasn’t got the star quality – to look at, to sit in or to drive – to eclipse it; a Porsche Cayenne Diesel S, though brilliant, just isn’t rounded or luxurious enough.

Which Velar to buy?
So where do we think the sweet spot in the Range Rover Velar model range may be?

On this evidence and that of our road test, Jaguar Land Rover’s four-cylinder diesel engines are to be avoided if possible. We have yet to test any of Land Rover’s petrol-powered models, and the 2.0-litre P250 and P300 certainly look like they could offer value to lower-mileage private buyers. But the 3.0-litre V6 D300 diesel would get our nod as the likeliest source of the refinement, economy, drivability and power you’ll want from your car. Remember, six-cylinder cars get air suspension as standard.

Trim level choice adds quite a lot of extra complication, but the important message here is that R-Dynamic makes the car look best. So we’d have an R-Dynamic SE D300 for £64,030 – and then add Land Rover’s Drive Pro Pack (adaptive cruise etc), On/Off Road pack (configurable dynamics, Terrain Response) and the paint colour, trim colour and wheels you like the look of most.

Spend big enough, it seems, and this Range Rover does have qualities worth spending on.

1st Range-topping diesel Rangie has the right mix of power, poise, refinement and richness to rule this test – although perhaps not the whole luxury SUV set

2nd Reserved, well-mannered, superbly constructed and roomy, the Q7 isn’t quite in the Velar’s league on lavishness, desirability or style

3rd Second-generation Cayenne is still the class boss on driver appeal.

Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Design & Styling

Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Design & Styling

A car’s styling often merits no more than a few cursory mentions in our road test, but the Range Rover Evoque demands an exception.

Supercars aside, only Citroën’s DS3 and some retro hatches draw so heavily on their design as a selling point.

The Evoque was born out of a desire to make Land Rover appeal to a more youthful audience. After a number of design studies were created, they were finally honed into the LRX concept car, which saw daylight at the 2008 Detroit motor show.

Even then, its future was uncertain; part or all of it could have become a premium Land Rover, or it could have been left as a show car. In the end, the whole design was adopted and given the Range Rover moniker.

The Evoque is, as much as possible, the LRX in production form. Land Rover is coy about having the two cars – concept and reality – photographed together, lest the production version look limp by comparison.

Little chance of that, we’d have thought. To our eyes, the Evoque is a brilliantly successful interpretation of how relevant, approachable and striking a contemporary 4x4 can look.

Have you ever seen an SUV with slimmer side and rear windows and a wedgier waistline? Nor have we. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Interior

Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Interior

The Evoque brings new dynamism and sparkle to the Range Rover marque inside. The dials add new bling to the dashboard, and the centre console – throughout Land Rover history as upright as the car’s nose – rakes steeply down towards the transmission tunnel.

There rests the rotary gearlever dial, born in a Jaguar but fast becoming a feature of all automatic JLR cars, and surrounded by more neatly designed, smaller switchgear than in previous Range Rovers.

Land Rover has trodden a careful path with the Evoque’s cabin. It would have been easy to over-glamorise it. Instead, it just errs towards the classy, without being overly bejewelled (except perhaps in the dials department). Perceived quality is broadly very commendable. You will find no better plastics, leathers or textures at this price.

Those surfaces extend to leather seats, whose shape looks more appealing than it feels to sit in during spirited driving, where several of our testers felt them too flat.

They’re a compromise somewhere between the upright ‘command’ driving position of which Land Rover is proud (and which this car’s short length dictates if decent rear legroom is to be maintained), and the conventional low-car driving position most Evoque buyers will be more familiar with.

A widely adjustable steering wheel means most will be able to find a comfortable driving position, but it took some of our testers a touch longer than usual to do so.

The rear cabin is respectable for adults, but the three-door variant (which costs more than the five-door) does put headroom at a much greater premium. With a high floor, a low roof and a stubby rear overhang, you’d expect the boot to be small, but it’s respectable, at 550 litres.

However, it dispenses, unforgivably for an SUV, with a spare wheel. Throw the rear seats forward and you create 1350 litres of volume. Meanwhile, Land Rover has, perhaps more astutely, taken care to ensure the Evoque can take a set of golf clubs “without long clubs having to be removed from the bag”.

The trim levels consist of five trims for the coupé and five-door Evoques and two for the convertible. The entry-level SE trim adorns the Evoque with automatic wipers and lights, paring sensors, 18in alloy wheels, leather upholstery and electrically adjustable front seats as standard, while the SE Tech models gain adaptive xenon headlights, front foglights, a heated front windscreen, and JLR's InControl infotainment system complete with sat nav.

Upgrade to the mid-range HSE Dynamic and you'll find a bodykit, 20in alloy wheels, and JLR's InControl Touch Pro infotainment system complete with a 10.0in touchscreen display and a 380W Meridian sound system, while the HSE Dynamic Lux adds luxuries such as keyless entry, 360-degree camera, a panoramic roof, a powered tailgate, lane assist, autonomous emergency braking, traffic sign recognition and an 825W, 16-speaker Meridian sound system.

The range-topping Autobiography models come with adaptive LED headlights, thick carpet and Oxford leather upholstery, ventilated front seats, heated rear seats and JLR's InControl Connect Pro pack. Completing the standard Evoque range is a limited edition Ember model which includes all the equipment found on the HSE Dynamic Lux model plus a snazzy black body and red roof paint job.

The convertible models are available in HSE Dynamic and HSE Dynamic Lux trims, which mirror their coupé and five-door siblings on the equipment front plus an all-terrain control mode and protection against rolling over on the former, while the latter adds a 660W Meridian sound system plus a wind deflector to the package. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Performance

Land Rover Range Rover Evoque Performance

Beneath the revolutionary skin, the Range Rover Evoque is a rather more evolutionary tale. Because it rolls down the same Merseyside production line as the Freelander, the two cars’ architectures are inextricably linked.

The Evoque’s engineering is its own, true, but without the Freelander links, which extend to about 30 percent of the architecture, there’d be no Evoque.

The Range Rover is up to 100kg lighter than the Freelander, though, partly because it is much shorter (at 4355mm it’s shorter than a Volkswagen Golf) and partly because of more extensive use of aluminium, both in its body panels and suspension, and plastics in the body.

That’s part of a drive for greater efficiency, as is the Range Rover Evoque’s electric power steering system, which is fixed to the front subframe, rather than the body, to improve steering feel.

The 2.2-litre diesel used in the Freelander, and in a raft of Ford, Peugeot and Citroën models, has been laid to rest with Land Rover populating the range with two versions of its Ingenium 2.0-litre oilburner - the an eco-friendly and efficient eD4 (available in only driving the front wheels, or 2.0-litre TD4 unit which produces 178bhp. Thumb the starter to fire the diesel and chances are that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the relative absence of clatter at idle. For initial refinement, it feels to us on a par with this engine’s application in Jaguar’s XF or, in fact, anywhere else that derivatives of this unit have been used to date.

To haul 1815kg, as tested, the Evoque’s 178bhp is on the modest side. At our test track, that power and 317lb ft of torque propelled the Evoque to 60mph in 9.5sec and dispatched 30-70mph in 9.5sec. The claimed maximum is 124mph. These are not poor figures and people do not usually come to SUVs expecting to find they go fast. Most Evoque buyers, however, will not have come to an SUV before and might be a mite surprised by how moderately their monetary outlay performs compared with the estate or coupé they had before it.

The Evoque features Land Rover’s Terrain Response system, which affects not only how the hardware and stability software reacts to different road surfaces, but also how much accelerator movement you need to make progress. Left in either ‘no program selected’ or Dynamic, both intended for road driving, the response is clean and smooth. There’s a little creep from rest, step-off is clean and the six-speed auto feels like it begins to lock up early to give positive shifts.

Smooth progress is easy to make, with the ’box shifting mostly intelligently. It returns its best economy in its Drive programme, so sometimes it is a little flustered if you ask for slightly more power than it was expecting, making for a reluctant downchange. Select Sport and things improve, but if, say, you’re cruising between roundabouts but want a kick in the back on the way out, neither is quite the ideal compromise.

There are shift paddles on the steering wheel if you want to make the decision yourself – something we found ourselves doing a touch more often than we’d expected.

A 148bhp eD4 variant is available just as a two-wheel drive model. Thanks in part to the 75kg weight saving from the deletion of the four-wheel drive gubbins, the two-wheel drive Evoque will emit as little as 109g/km and return as much as 67.3mpg.

The other available engine is a 237bhp 2.0-litre turbo petrol, mated to 4WD and an automatic gearbox only. This engine dramatically alters the Evoque's character, playing to the strengths of taut, agile handling overlaid on proper off-road ability. It takes just a few hundred yards to sense this fastest Evoque's eager pace and the crisp revvability of its engine.

The convertible models are only available as automatics powered by the range-topping diesel or petrol engines. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Discovery Sport Design & Styling

Land Rover Discovery Sport Design & Styling

When you learn that the new Discovery Sport will be built alongside the Range Rover Evoque at Land Rover’s Halewood plant on Merseyside, it would be easy to assume that the two share the same platform.

However, that’s only half of the truth. Although the two are largely the same at the front, the Discovery Sport is all new from the B-pillars back. This is eminently sensible. The major crash structure and most complex mechanicals of a modern car sit between the axle line and the A-pillars.

Making changes to those areas costs lots of time and even more money. So the subframe, with a magnesium crossmember and other components, is largely the same around the front, although, unlike the Evoque, the Discovery Sport has a pedestrian airbag in its nose.

Aft of the B-pillars, however, the Discovery Sport has a new structure that leaves it 80mm longer than the Evoque, all of which comes from within the wheelbase. The changes include a new multi-link rear suspension system that has only minimal intrusion into the passenger and luggage compartment, enabling the fitment of those +2 rear chairs.

JLR’s £500 million investment in its new engine plant in Wolverhampton has rid it of its reliance on other people’s powerplants, which has seen the 2.2-litre, Ford-derived turbodiesel become a thing of the past and replaced by the smaller capacity Ingenium units.

The model tested here is badged as the SD4, it’s offered in 188bhp form, which it generates at 3500rpm, with a torque output of 310lb ft at 1750rpm. Regardless of whether you buy Disco Sport with an SD4 or TD4 engine, that’s enough, says Land Rover, to tow 2200kg – or 2500kg if you delete the +2 rear seats. That’s quite a lot more than the claimed kerb weight of 1863kg, which might alarm some towers, so it’s worth noting that this test car tipped our scales at a substantial 2081kg.

That portliness will affect the fuel consumption, as will the Discovery Sport’s hardware. This is, after all, a Land Rover, so it isn’t let out of the factory unless it will do things off road that its rivals simply can’t.

To that end, the Sport receives Land Rover’s Terrain Response control, although because this is a coil and not air-sprung Land Rover, there’s a limit to what it can adjust and its performance largely centres around tweaking of the electronic stability program.

But the Discovery Sport also has a full-time four-wheel drive system with a Haldex centre coupling and is electronically controlled so it can push power forward or aft as it pleases. The Sport is also expected to wade through 600mm of water and have class-leading approach, departure and breakover angles.

Whether it can combine all those with fine on-road dynamics is what we’re about to see. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Discovery Sport Interior

Land Rover Discovery Sport Interior

The channel Land Rover has had to negotiate with the Sport’s cabin is a narrow one. A premium look and feel are vital if the model is to compete with upmarket offerings from BMW and Audi, yet it cannot be permitted to trample on the toes of the Evoque, which remains above it in the range pecking order.

Thus, the debonair sense of style you get in the Evoque is restrained here. This is plainly a more workaday effort. The chunky handsomeness – best expressed in the bold, straight lines and clearly labelled switchgear – owes much to the outgoing Freelander’s aesthetic, although the cliff face of dashboard is pure Evoque. The driving position, happily, is merely archetypal Land Rover, meaning somewhere between crow’s nest and comfy lounge chair.

A Range Rover customer would spot the bottom-line compromises made by the manufacturer when it picked out trim materials (evident even in our high-spec test car), but a good dealer will encourage you to swivel around and regard the Sport’s extra seats as the proper point of differentiation.

There are six trim levels to spec the Land Rover Discovery Sport out in. The entry-level SE trim comes with part-leather trim, climate and cruise control, heated front seats, Bluetooth, rear parking sensors and JLR's latest 8.0in colour touchscreen with DAB radio, all as standard. Mid-level SE Tech adds sat-nav, automatic lights and wipers, front parking sensors and the useful power tailgate.

Opt for the HSE level and expect such luxuries as keyless entry, a panoramic sunroof, rear view camera and a 380W Meridian sound system, while the HSE Black trim adds black exterior trim and 20in alloy wheels. In HSE Luxury trim, the Discovery Sport further gains full leather interior, heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel, USB ports and a self-parking mode, meanwhile the range-topping HSE Dynamic Lux adds sporty details and trim.

The packaging sleight of hand is impressive – you really wouldn’t think there’s room, despite the 2741mm wheelbase – although its cons are obvious enough. With hardly anywhere for the second tier to go, a potentially shin-bruising clamber is required to reach the third row, making the two rearmost seats virtually adult-proof from the start.

Nevertheless, the individual pews, modestly raised from the boot floor, are proper little perches rather than mere hollows, and with the sacrifice of the some leg room for the passenger in front, there’s clearly enough room for fledgling legs.

As the +2 designation suggests, the arrangement is about short-haul capacity only. This is not a seven-seat family car in the conventional mould. Certainly, there isn’t much load space left once the third row is up. That doesn’t significantly detract from the usefulness of the system, though.

Much like the Sport’s ability to climb a mountain, you wouldn’t expect to use it every day, but it’s nice to know it’s there should you need it. Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Discovery Sport Performance

Land Rover Discovery Sport Performance

There is only two engine options on the Discovery Sport - both use the same 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder diesel unit, producing two outputs - 148bhp and 177bhp.

However, our test car used Ford-derived 2.2-litre diesel and the Sport’s most noticeable connection to the past is unmistakably that engine, which currently shadows everything the car does with the clatter and gunsmoke odour of yesteryear. Denying the car the new four-cylinder Ingenium oil-burner from launch was clearly the model’s on-paper Achilles heel and, to a greater or lesser extent, that’s the way it plays out on the road.

However, although the direct-injected 2.2-litre motor is not a paragon of refinement or efficiency, its later-life development has at least ensured that it produces the unmistakable surge expected of a modern blower-equipped diesel.

On stream, its 310lb ft of torque is a plentiful amount, and it feels that way. For a car that tipped the scales on the wrong side of two tonnes when we weighed it, a sub-9.0sec 0-60mph time is very decent. So is the 9.0sec it takes to get from 30mph to 70mph, very slightly bettering the time we recorded for the much-admired 2.2-litre engine in the Mazda CX-5 a couple of years ago.

In fact, the soft underbelly of the package is at times evident less in the 20th century motor and more in the 21st century gearbox to which it has been shackled.

Rather inevitably, the nine-speed automatic transmission’s keenness to keep the engine spinning at its productive mid-range pitch means that you’re going to have to live with a lot of downshifting – particularly on the motorway, where the never-ending 47.5mph per 1000rpm final ratio cannot be trusted with even modest acceleration.

However, it’s the intermittent hesitancy experienced at fast getaways that tends to chafe. It’s not quite clear whether this is a function of the gearbox’s default to second – keeping an ultra-low first ratio chiefly for off-road duties – or the initial reluctance to lock up that we’ve sometimes encountered in other ZF-equipped Land Rovers, but the half second of driveline bemusement is infuriating when you’re trying to make a gap in the traffic.

Nevertheless, the nine-speeder’s otherwise swift function (it will block change rather than cycle sequentially) and inclination to shift are what make the automatic Sport significantly faster than the six-speed manual and keeping the fire stoked is an attitude that suits the car just fine.

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Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR interior

Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR interior

SVO received a pretty good base point for the SVR’s interior, so it hasn’t taken a huge amount of work to make a Range Rover Sport’s cabin feel appropriate for a car costing in excess of £100,000. Material quality, fit and finish are all pretty much first rate.

The resolution on some of the digital touchscreen’s graphics and the head-up display is bettered by that of some of the German car makers, but even the standard Sport counters with a sense of rare opulence inside.

For the SVR, the differences are slight but sufficient to give the Sport another lift – albeit one aimed squarely at those looking for performance cues rather than luxury ones. They get them in the deeply sculpted shapes of the seats, which scream ‘sporty’ in a way that’s slightly out of kilter with the fact that you’re looking horizontally across at them, not down on them, when you open the door.

Land Rover’s high-set driving position is unchanged by buckets that, ultimately, look more supportive than they are. There’s no denying that the driving position remains strong, however, with plenty of room for occupants both front and rear. The steering column electrically adjusts through a vast range and the seats have 16-way adjustment.

Sporty chairs aren’t just reserved for front-seat occupants either. Open the back door and you’ll find rear passengers get the same look to their chairs, right down to the holes for harnesses that will never be fitted. A fifth seat remains, but Land Rover calls it ‘occasional’. We’d like to be in it even less frequently than that.

However, the rear seatbacks still split 60/40 and fold, so, discomfort of the fifth seat aside, the car remains as practical as ever. The boot is large – 489 litres in capacity with the seats up, rising to 1761 litres with them folded.

As for the standard equipment, the SVR is certainly well-endowed. It basically has all the bits fitted to a Range Rover Sport Autobiography Dynamic plus darken headlights, exterior gloss black trim, a specially-made rear spoiler, a quad-exhaust system, an aggressive bodykit, blue Brembo brakes, heated seats all round and perforated Oxford leather upholstery. source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR performance

Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR performance

Presented with nothing else to do, the SVR’s optional head-up display shows only two numbers: your speed and the legal limit. Basic information, you might think, but a vital reminder given the rarity with which these numbers marry up organically.

The combination of Range Rover variant and JLR’s bombastic V8 is a familiar one, and that fact makes the new-found ferocity of the SVR’s performance even more startling. Where the standard motor is a prodigiously swift, relentlessly sonorous item, the SVO treatment has delivered a rabidness for which the extra 40bhp hardly accounts.

Indeed, in S mode (a convenient wrist nudge of the gear selector to the left), the SVR’s caterwauling acceleration doesn’t just make for a satisfying comparison with its stablemate; instead, it rivals that of the all-wheel-drive F-Type R with which this car shares its ECU.

Despite giving away a preposterous 700kg in kerb weight, the Sport’s one-way 0-60mph time at Millbrook was just 0.2sec behind Jaguar’s claim for its quickest coupé yet.

Of course, the SVR enjoys a traction advantage over that model, but even when measured against the Porsche Macan Turbo we figured last year (itself at least 300kg lighter), the Range Rover is still 0.3sec to the good – and a full second quicker over a standing kilometre.

As startling as they are, the figures provide only a pencil sketch of what is undeniably an oil and canvas experience. As it is in the F-Type R, the V8 is truly on song from a little after 3000rpm to about 6000rpm. As the in-gear numbers attest, its efforts tend to trail off slightly before upshifts, but that’s barely apparent when you’re subjected to the brutish, unflagging shove of the thing. It’s part tectonic plate and part Bowler Wildcat.

And then, when you’ve had enough, plainer sailing is just an additional gear selector waggle back towards you. In D mode, the SVR reverts closer to type: the accelerator is duller, ratio swaps slushier and the butterfly valves firmly shut until beyond 4000rpm. It isn’t schizophrenic enough for you to forget the underlying frenzy entirely, but that is as it should be.  Source by autocar.co.uk

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Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR review

Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR review
It takes an inordinate amount of brand cachet and confidence to do this. At a time when austerity is still making front page headlines throughout the western world, this is a £96,900 Range Rover Sport (£108,450 as tested) that has 542bhp.

Those are large figures that could easily seem out of kilter with the times. But austerity be damned: this car has been coming, no matter what.

In the past year, more than 500,000 people have become millionaires in the United States alone, and that rate is being outstripped by the Chinese. There are now more people than ever before who have the means to afford cars like this Range Rover Sport SVR, the first Land Rover product of Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division.

The people at SVO have made the SVR nothing less than the most powerful Land Rover in the company’s history. The car deploys 542bhp from its supercharged 5.0-litre V8 engine and adopts a raft of mechanical and dynamic changes to accompany the extra horsepower.

This is still a vast SUV, but given the kind of demand that’s available globally for luxury and performance 4x4s, the question, then, is no longer “why would you make a car of this size, with this power?”. Given that there are so many people with the income and inclination to buy one, the question is “why wouldn’t you make one?”.

It’s a question BMW asked itself with the X5 M as long ago as 2010 and that it answered well enough to continue into the latest X5 and X6. But, then, BMW was ahead of the game when it introduced the X5 a good half decade before Range Rover launched the Mk1 Sport in 2005. Porsche’s Cayenne Turbo is into its second generation, too.

So the fact that the SVR only now tops a Sport line-up that has, in this second generation, been on sale since 2013 means it’s a latecomer. We’ll find out whether the time has been well spent.Source by autocar.co.uk

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