2011 Range Rover Evoque Si4 | Review

PH battles puddles and ruts in our very own 'Evoque Adventure'

The Range Rover Evoque takes exactly as long to build as the Land Rover Freelander, which is good news as the pair share the production line at Halewood and there's not much room for overtaking. Boom-boom...

Evoque customers who order a contrast-coloured roof put a spanner in the works, as their newly painted cars have to be diverted to a separate spray booth. A robot takes care of painting the tin top, but masking-up the car beforehand requires six peoplebots, as the task needs to be completed in four minutes. Otherwise the factory grinds to a halt, which sounds like a production engineer's nightmare - and is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you give designers a totally free hand with a new model.

It's worth it presumably, because the new Evoque is definitely eye-candy. We've just returned from a scoot across North Wales from Anglesey to Liverpool - taking in the aptly re-named 'Evoque Triangle' - and our strung-out convoy of three and five door versions turned heads all the way. Assembled hacks were kind about it too, but with multiple free lunches, dinners and late night drinkies on offer, anything else might have sounded churlish. (On PH's behalf, I took the liberty of remarking that it was 'fabulous', darlings.)

Yep, it's finally 'global launch' time for the new baby Range Rover, which means for the next few weeks the good people of North Wales and Liv-air-pewl had better get used to a bunch of funny looking strangers careering about the place with dialects more bewildering than their own.

Car launches are lavish and expensive affairs that usually take place abroad, in part because most of the world's journalistic talent isn't used to driving on the correct side of the road, but mainly because (JLR aside) we don't have a volume car industry HQ'd on this island. So it was important that PH did its bit to help JLR support Britain's ailing economy as it launched the Evoque 'chez UK', and we racked up a decent tab for refreshments at every opportunity.

We also racked up a considerable chunk of mileage in the new Evoque, and were impressed with both its quality feel and its driving dynamics. OK, it's no out-and-out sports car in spite of references to 'hot hatch handling' you might read elsewhere (perhaps PH hatches have to be 'hotter' than others?), but it does cover ground with a vivacity and aplomb that belies the car's sheer size and weight.

It's nimbler than a Range Rover Sport, for instance, with a combination of well-considered electric power steering and MagneRide active damping making it quite enjoyable to punt across the moors. The latter is a switchable system with a 'dynamic' mode, which diminishes the ride comfort slightly but controls body-roll even better if you pitch an Evoque into an unexpectedly tightening corner, unexpectedly fast. (Yes, those Welsh ewes are damnably distracting... Ed.) Switching to Dynamic mode also turns the instrument dials from cool white to (angry?) red, which probably sounded like a spiffing wheeze in the design meetings.

The EPAS set-up is rather good, weighting up a little in dynamic mode to make you feel more sporty, and is finely tuned for precision and linear response to inputs. This gives you confidence when threading the car through country lanes or placing the car through fast sweepers. However when the going gets really tight, the Evoque's 'designer' bodywork makes it harder to get a feel for where the car ends and dry stone wall starts - a very un-Land Rover-esque trait. Presumably aware that vision is going to be a factor in town too, the firm offers a Surround Camera System with five digital cameras. Looking at them all working at once on the centrally-mounted monitor is a bit of a melon-twister, but fortunately you can choose the individual view you want. The outlook upwards, whether of forest canopy, rain clouds or Liverpool skyscraper, is remarkable thanks to a massive window in the roof.

We concentrated on driving the 2.0 240PS Si4 petrol engine, although diesels are likely to be more popular, because... well, penury and/or the revenue weren't knocking on the door when we were asked to choose. It's a great installation which, in combination with a smooth-shifting 8-speed autobox (you can only have manual with the diesels) revs smoothly and strongly, delivering you to 60mph in 7.1secs without appearing to strain itself unduly at all. JLR has clearly worked hard to engineer refinement into the Evoque, and they've got it right. There's a Mahle sound generator which emphasises the four cylinder engine's more luxuriant tones inside the cabin, and the generous amount of interior padding and cladding adds to the sense of all-round quietitude. It's definitely a nice place to ride in comfort for a few hours at a time.

Is it a real Range Rover though? Well, we were offered quite a bit of mild-ish green-laning to prove the car's off-road credentials, but perhaps it isn't - at least if you're a tweedy traditionalist for whom a Range Rover will always be a car and not a brand.

For more liberal thinkers though, it is a genuinely interesting and desirable new product, and we can't imagine why anyone on the growing waiting list will be disappointed when theirs turns up.

If you're not on the list yet, JLR has thoughtfully provided this price list. (Do we get commission...? Ed.)