![]() Americans might spot shades of Kia’s impressive but not-for-Europe Telluride, but that’s no bad thing. It’s also notably aerodynamic for a big SUV, with a drag co-efficient of 0.30 and a smoother frontal area. Check out the vertical tail-lights, and the way the whole thing resolves. The car’s rear end taps into that idea, and is the area of the car that’s most obviously different. This is a car that will be at its imperious best sweeping along the motorway like an automotive super-yacht. Design pushed engineering – and vice versa – and the result is as much an ode to metal-beating and manufacturing technique as it is aesthetics. The panel gaps and shutlines are fabulously tight, and the flush glazing abuts the bodysides in memorable fashion. ![]() 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. (He doesn’t wade in water, he walks on it.) There are five fundamental visual pillars on the Range Rover: the falling roofline, pronounced waistline, the rising sill, clamshell bonnet and floating roof. ![]() Not that you’d ever get even a whiff of self-doubt from the company’s chief creative officer, the formidable – and gleefully opinionated – Gerry McGovern. The outgoing car remains such an archetype that the scale of the challenge here is substantial. That’s even less likely to go swimming up the Severn. Seriously, has anyone ever taken their Range Rover into a chuffing river? A fully electric model, meanwhile, will arrive in 2024. 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. So it is that the all-new Range Rover arrives powered by a pair of diesels – making 296bhp and 345bhp respectively – and two petrols, good for 395bhp and a 523bhp (and 553 torques). Unfortunately we won’t be driving the PHEVs for another six months. Not quite a ‘get out of jail free’ card, but a big improvement. 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. We’d say 50 miles in the real world is more plausible. These combine Land Rover’s 3.0-litre six cylinder petrol engine with a 105kW battery feeding an electric motor with a useable capacity of 31.8kWh, to deliver ‘up to 62 miles’ of pure electric driving with CO2 emissions around 30g/km. Key here are two plug-in hybrids, badged P440e and P510e (that equates to a 434 and 503bhp power output respectively). This is an all-new car in every aspect with a critical reappraisal of its place in the world. 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. 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. The current model arrived in 2012 and even in these unpredictable times it’s still hitting the spot with its high-end client base. ![]() The P440e and P510e are plug-in hybrids, and an EV is due in 2024.The Range Rover is one of those vanishingly rare cars that defies the industry’s traditional product cycle. Engines are all straight sixes, apart from the BMW V8-powered P530. The Range Rover is offered with a standard and a long wheelbase, though not all engines are available in the long-wheelbase version. We are about to test all those credentials and more in the toughest test in the business. That makes the Range Rover not just a high-end SUV but one that wants to be a luxury car, too. And one can go much further: this is a regular-wheelbase Range Rover but there’s a long one too, and a raft of petrol engines that make a lot more oomph again, before you even get into more bespoke Special Vehicle Operations territory.
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