Though it’s (implicitly) targeted at those who want a luxury material that avoids animal products, the textile – produced by Danish designer Kvadrat – looks and feels special enough to serve as a leather substitute. For the first time in a Land Rover, a premium non-leather textile fabric is available for the seats, commanding a $2,500 premium. This leather is available in six colours, including a fetching tan and black two-tone. It isn’t cheap, but you’ll benefit from stepping up to high-grade Windsor leather, which makes the Velar’s hides soft enough to wear the Range Rover badge. A further 12-inch widescreen can be optioned ahead of the driver, providing a large map in line-of-sight, or an impression of traditional gauges.Ĭustomisation is encouraged, with the contemporary cabin providing a blank canvas for a broad choice of upholstery colours and material choices. Super-crisp and intuitive, the twin screens are standard and mark out technology as a Velar strong suit – the Porsche Macan and Mercedes GLC cabins look, by contrast, basic. There are cues from the Range Rover Sport in here, but with major updates that include a focus around a dual stacked touchscreen arrangement in the centre console. Inside, the Velar debuts Land Rover’s new cabin concept. Side-by-side, the Velar makes the Sport – itself a handsome vehicle – look, well, old.Īspirational, then? Sure, from the outside – and the Velar’s sensory assault continues once you’ve pulled the chunky handles – which are accessible when the vehicle is stopped and unlocked, before tucking away into the bodywork. The Velar has clear Range Rover DNA, but the implementation is up to the minute, with striking light assemblies, vanishing door handles, appropriately upsize wheels, and attractive use of gloss black to highlight aggressive elements on the face and side profile. The looks capture attention, with a wide range of colour, wheel, roof and appearance package options available. The size is about right, on the long side of medium. Instead, this finished product hits a number of early high notes, which start when you approach the car. Fast forward forty-eight years, though, and the second use of the Velar name is far from a prototype. Early prototypes, in an effort to disguise the true new badge, wore the codename ‘Velar’ on their bonnets. In the mid-sixties, the brand were out to design a more comfortable version of their Series II farm wagon – a vehicle that would eventually become the first-generation Range Rover. Haven’t heard of Velar? You’d be forgiven: this is a name seen in the Land Rover history books before, though only brand anoraks would remember it. Medium-sized, packing plenty of visual flair and spanning broad price points from $71,000 to $169,000, the Velar finds clear targets in the Macan, GLC, and X5 set. Hence the business case for a new Range Rover model line – the 2018 Range Rover Velar. The Range Rover Evoque is town-sized the new Land Rover Discovery, and the venerable Range Rover Sport, are both on the large side – and in the case of the Sport, competition from Porsche makes that car look a little out of vogue, design-wise. However, the big demand now is for premium mid-size SUVs – and oddly, there hasn’t really been one on Land Rover showroom floors. And until recently, the brand’s five-pronged range, split into two (slightly) more utilitarian Land Rover-badged vehicles, and three aspirational Range Rovers, has been adequate. Everybody wants some underlying layer of off-roading ability, the brand says, but the rest is all negotiable: big, small, in-between fast, or economical comfortable, or sporty. Britain’s original four-wheel-drive specialist is flush with credibility and that badge is highly desirable – so as the market for high-riders has grown and grown, Land Rover’s biggest problem is having enough products to offer. The boom in SUVS – and luxury SUVs, in particular – has been great for Land Rover.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |