Review Range Rover Velar

The Velar is here!

Winter is coming, but not for a couple of months. It means the sun, rather pleased with its journey across Norway, takes its owns sweet time to dip below the horizon. The sky, at half past ten, is plastered in such virulent shades of orange and purple that one requires a polite tap on the shoulder to divert attention to the rainbow arcing over the languid waters of the harbour and disappearing into the pot of gold holed up in the craggy mountains. Winter will come, but till then streams gurgle through forests we spent the better part of the day driving through, dense forests rolling over proud mountains, once home to the children of the forest and latterly cubs of direwolves. Hard to imagine that when winter does come, a heavy white cloak over proud mountains blankets the green entirely, the sun, displeased at the turn of events, harries across the horizon, and writers under the influence of George R R Martin’s preferred juice, conjure up whitewalkers to harry the free folk beyond the wall. The seven kingdoms can take care of themselves for now. We have something as stunning as Norway itself, the Velar.

It’s not like us to start a test yammering about colour and styling but the Velar deserves a paragraph on the way it looks. Does it not look like a concept car? I was at the Geneva motor show when the wraps were taken off it and, no way said I, is this SUV hitting the roads like this. Okay, everybody is doing impossibly slim lights these days, but nobody has blended wheels this large, roofline this low and flanks this smooth on a regular production SUV. Where the f*** are the door handles, I asked. Yet the Velar we are driving, and which you will be able to buy in India before the year is out, has every one of those details that until recently were the purview of only concept cars, and in the cool light of day looks even more breathtaking.

With the Velar, it is difficult to not stop and stare

It’s unmistakably a Range Rover, with all the associated nose-in-the-air posh-ness, yet it is also astonishingly sexy – the love child of the Evoque and Range Rover Sport, but better looking and more desirable. It pulls off red better than the Evoque. The door handles pop out when required (with sufficient force to break through any ice that has frozen over it) and then you use them like proper chunky door handles, after which they disappear flush into the bodywork. It has posh copper accenting on the grilles and vents, stuff that has been swapped for gloss black on the silver Velar pictured here. And even though I’m not a member of the PETA, I like that you can swap out the leather on the interior for a designer fabric that is equally expensive and equally snooty.On roads like these and with the Velar, it is difficult to not stop and stare

Oh, the interiors. Step in and there’s the so-called butcher’s block running the breadth of the dash, a Range Rover design element for the past decade or so. But that’s about the only nod to the past. Everything else is as modern as modern can be, glossy black screens that remain a deathly black until you thumb the starter, all switchgear, all clutter, everything thrown out of the cabin. Thumb the starter and the gear selector whirrs up, a trick that’s become old and familiar now, but then the screen on the console tilts up to present itself. This is accompanied by another 10.3-inch screen below it lighting up. Touch Pro Duo, as Land Rover calls it, takes the familiar touchscreen-ery and brings it up to the standard of what the Germans have achieved. Gone is the old lag. Responses are immediate, graphics are full-high resolution, and the menus are exhaustive. I’ll not kid you, it does take some time getting used to, to finding where everything is and not pressing the wrong buttons while on the move, but at the same time it is very cool, very sexy. The Terrain Response modes on the lower screen are now accompanied by artfully-lit studio shots of the Velar on different terrain, making it tough to change modes while on the move but making passengers coo in wonder when you do flip through the various modes. I’d have liked to see gesture control as well, and to hell with the they’ve-copied-BMW taunts.

The door handles are cool too

Space is good too. Now the Velar slots in between the Evoque and Range Rover Sport and is the fourth distinct SUV in the Range Rover line-up, sixth if you consider the full Land Rover line-up. Space, a big sticky point with the Evoque, borders more towards the RR Sport but without the third row of seats that would be eating too much into Sport territory. It means there’s good enough space for a 5-foot 9-incher sitting behind me and there’s a good enough boot as well (though this is the first Range Rover without a full-size spare wheel). And the Velar also gets the Evoque’s full-length glass sunroof which is a really cool thing to have.The door handles are cool too

I did say the Velar was very different from the Evoque and Sport, and that’s because it is based not on any Range Rover platform but the F-Pace’s architecture (they don’t call it platforms) that also underpins the XE and XF. There’s some steel under the boot floor to enable a near-perfect weight distribution, magnesium under the bonnet and a composite tailgate to keep kerb weight under two tonnes. The suspension is the same double wishbone at the front and multi-link at the rear with air suspension on the V6 models that we drove and steel springs on the 4-cylinder models that will form the bulk of sales in India. In a sense that means there’s more Jaguar in the Velar than Range Rover; in fact, at 81 per cent, the Velar has more aluminium than the F-Pace. The key question to answer then is whether the Velar drives like an F-Pace.

And charging down absurdly narrow B-roads of Norway the answer is no. Even though the Velar is the most road-focused SUV Land Rover has ever made and even though, like the F-Pace, it is primarily rear-driven (a chain drive sends torque to the front when required), it still has that unique sense of Range Rover-ness. A certain gravitas in the way it hunkers down on an undulating road, the sophistication to its damping, the maturity to the way it powers itself down a winding road. It doesn’t feel as urgent and Porsche-like as the F-Pace but that’s a good thing. Drive the two back-to-back and there’s no way of pointing out the similar architectures. The Velar is the more considered Ned Stark to the F-Pace’s charge-into-battle Rob Stark.The Velar looks as stunning as probably Norway itself.

No descent is too steep for the Velar

And the Velar can go off the road; it’s in the genes with 24deg approach, 27deg departure and 20deg breakover angles. Ground clearance on steel springs is 213mm (coil springs) and 251mm on air suspension, while wading depth is 600mm on steel and 650mm on air. We spent half the day in Norway bombing down dirt tracks, trying our very best Andreas Mikkelsen impression. (What, you haven’t heard of Norway’s best rally driver, the 2017 Rally Germany runner-up?) Norway being so sparsely populated, and the weather so harsh, half the highways are actually dirt tracks and the Velar, like any SUV actually, tackles it easily. With 700Nm, the V6 diesel has more than enough grunt on tap but the engines that will be relevant for India are the 4-cylinders, the 247bhp Ingenium turbo-petrol and 178bhp Ingenium diesel. All engines get the (more refined) 8-speed automatic and though we didn’t get to sample the four-pots we did get to hammer around in the supercharged 376bhp V6 petrol that does have a snarly soundtrack to add to the entertainment.No descent is too steep for the Velar

The next day though, shit got serious as we raised the air suspension, stuck it in mud-and-ruts mode and clambered up a rock-strewn path that was actually to a ski slope. The Velar gets Land Rover’s Terrain Response 2 system but unlike the Sport there’s no low ratio, you can’t you lock the centre differential and you can’t choose the power split. The electronics do all these for you and the All-Terrain Progress Control ensures that you set the speed, and the Velar does everything for you; you just have to steer, and cover your nose from the stink of the brakes working real hard. A monkey could off-road in a Velar, or ford streams for that matter, up to a depth of 650mm. Ultimately what limits it are the 22-inch wheels shod with low-pro tyres as on our First Edition test car.

Finished in white, the interiors leave you speechless

But, truth be told, you don’t really want to go off the road in the Velar. You don’t want to damage that pretty, expensive body. Actually wait, the Velar won’t be ridiculously expensive. Brexit and GST mean the petrol four-pot will start at approximately 75 lakh rupees with the diesel four-pot at 85 lakh rupees. The V6 with air-suspension and R-Dynamic package as pictured here will set you back by a crore of rupees, which is a fair packet, then again this is a Range Rover; it looks, feels and is as well appointed as anything you’d expect wearing that badge. And when winter does come the Velar will take you across the seven kingdoms.