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Say hello to the assembled-in-India Range Rover. 16 years after Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover and nine years after local assembly of the Evoque and Discovery Sport began, the crown jewels have now arrived in India. In a box of parts, carefully put together in JLR’s Pune factory. This, I suspect, will be a game changer. Long on the sidelines of the Indian luxury car business, JLR India now have the pricing muscle to capitalise on the sky-high desirability of the badge and thus, erm, muscle into Mercedes’ and BMW’s Top End Vehicles (TEV) business.
The locally-assembled Range Rover Sport will be offered only in the Dynamic SE trim with both petrol and diesel 3-litre engines and identically priced at Rs 1.4 crore. The 3-litre diesel is in the new mild-hybrid state of tune putting out 346bhp and a massive 700Nm of torque, enough to haul this 5.2-metre, 2.5-tonne SUV to 100kmph in 6.3 seconds and onto a top speed of 234kmph. Make no mistake, this is fast. And this feels fast, what with the seating position akin to being perched on top of a hill. The very same seating position also delivers that fabulous driving environment that only Range Rover can provide, a king-of-the-world feel, lord and master of everything you survey, imperial and impervious allied to deliciously cosseting suspension compliance.
Local assembly does mean an end to the near-infinite list of customisations and the diesel HSE and petrol Autobiography are the only two locally-assembled Range Rovers you can buy, both in long wheelbase trim. We must dig in to find out what options have quietly been deleted. Obvious thing to knock off would be rear-wheel steering but I can make a tighter U-turn than our support car, which means the ridiculously good manoeuvrability – for something this vast! – hasn’t been changed. Ventilation and massage? All four seats get it. It’s silly to expect woods and leathers to be pared back and nothing of the sort has happened, though the Autobiography does get a better spec for the Meridian sound system. The rear seat gets one-touch recline, which slides and contorts the front left seat out of the way, letting you fully stretch out. But you don’t get an ottoman to rest your feet, nor do you get a fridge to chill your black alkaline water (don’t ask!). You also get (standard) rear screens, and you can also hit wade mode which allows up to 900mm of water wading.
I said hit. I should have said tap, because everything is a tap or three on the Pivi Pro system that has eliminated almost every physical button and piled into menu after menu on the infotainment. This includes the lovely Terrain Response dial which is now another page in the many pages of menus. Punching a button or shoving a lever to engage low-range 4x4 is so much more satisfying than adding another smudge mark to the screen.Not that any Range Rover owner will indulge in off-roading of any sort, mud-plugging ambitions tempered by the price of a 21-inch tyre. Rs 50 to 60 grand if you’re asking!
Armed with that knowledge you will be happy to know that India-spec cars get TPMS as standard (was a cost option on the CBU imports) so you can’t plead ignorance when you ruin a tyre. Nothing holding you back from ruining the new car smell, though Range Rover have added the second row smokers pack (ashtray and cigarette lighter) as standard. One vehemently hopes that owners will instead employ the (standard) air purifier to keep the stink of the real world where it belongs. Outside. Which you will be forced to endure when you rock up to the red carpet, the driver selects access height, and you step out to tell the world you’ve arrived.
The headline number is not power, not torque, not acceleration, but price. Rs 2.36 crore for the diesel HSE we are testing here. And Rs. 2.6 crore for the petrol Autobiography that Delhi-NCR dealers will be hungrily hoovering up, the larger 22-inch wheels, perfectly in sync with the likes and desires of North India. To put it into perspective, that’s between 20 and 22 per cent more affordable than when Range Rovers were imported into India, not taking into account the reduced registration taxes, which will further bring down the cost of acquisition. JLR are also making appropriate noises about sorting out their service operations, including a 5-year service plan.
