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Land Rover Range Rover review
What is it?
The Range Rover is one of those vanishingly rare cars that defies the industry’s traditional product cycle. The last model arrived in 2012 and even in these unpredictable times it was still hitting the spot with its high-end client base a decade later.
But then you see the new one - only the fifth generation in 51 years - and you realise that there are some things even the Range Rover can’t out-run forever. Namely, the march of technology and connectivity, and more pressingly the need to future-proof it as climate change ceases to be a debate and becomes a genuine existential emergency.
Has the Range Rover reassessed its position on profligate consumption?
This is an all-new car in every aspect with a critical reappraisal of its place in the world. Key here are two plug-in hybrids, badged P460e and P550e (that equates to 454 and 542bhp respectively). These combine Land Rover’s 3.0-litre six cylinder petrol engine with a 31.8kWh battery feeding a 105kW (141bhp) electric motor to deliver ‘up to 74 miles’ of pure electric driving with CO2 emissions around 16g/km. 50 miles in the real world is more plausible.
Land Rover reckons that typical Range Rover customers will be able to complete 75 per cent of their journeys without ever bothering the internal combustion engine. Not quite a ‘get out of jail free’ card, but a big improvement.
Alongside that sits a pair of diesels - making 296bhp and 345bhp respectively - and two mild hybrid petrols, good for 395bhp and 523bhp. The latter is a twin turbo petrol V8 (sourced from BMW), whose intake has been reconfigured to enable a 900mm wading depth, plus a few other robust mods.
Seriously, has anyone ever taken their Range Rover into a chuffing river? Well, except Her late Majesty. A fully electric model, meanwhile, will arrive in 2024. That’s even less likely to go swimming up the Severn.
What's new?
Everything. The outgoing car remains such an archetype that the scale of the challenge here is substantial. There are five fundamental visual pillars on the Range Rover: the falling roofline, pronounced waistline, the rising sill, clamshell bonnet and floating roof. They’ve all been reimagined here, although you need to see new and old side-by-side to grasp just how ingeniously nuanced the changes are.
The panel gaps and shutlines are fabulously tight, and the flush glazing abuts the bodysides in memorable fashion. The rain guttering is hidden, too. Design pushed engineering - and vice versa - and the result is as much an ode to metal-beating and manufacturing technique as it is aesthetics.
This is a car that will be at its imperious best sweeping along the motorway like an automotive super-yacht. The car’s rear end taps into that idea, and is the area of the car that’s most obviously different. Check out the vertical tail-lights, and the way the whole thing is resolved. It’s also notably aerodynamic for a big SUV, with a drag coefficient of 0.30 and a smoother frontal area. Americans might spot shades of Kia’s impressive but not-for-Europe Telluride, but that’s no bad thing. It’s a great looking car, that.
Read More www.topgear.com/car-reviews/l...