Tuesday 23rd April

First official look at new Range Rover Electric

The quietest and most refined Range Rover 'ever made' is nearly here - and it looks reassuringly familiar

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Land Rover hasn’t wasted any time with camouflaging its very latest prototype. After all, what you can’t see is more important than what you can when it comes to the new Range Rover Electric, the manufacturer’s first fully-fledged EV. Built on the existing platform, we already knew that the newcomer would look very much like the current Range Rover; Land Rover’s all-black test cars suggest that, details and badges and flaps aside, we might struggle to tell the difference between combustion, hybrid and battery-powered derivatives. 

Staying true to ‘its modernist design language’ is obviously meant to be part of the appeal. People who buy Range Rovers aren’t typically shy or reticent about the decision - and the 16,000 indications of interest it claimed to have received back in February points to significant support for the concept of one that is essentially the same, albeit powered by electricity exclusively. At any rate, this is the EV that Land Rover seems intent on building first. 

“[A] Range Rover with electric power – means customary Range Rover luxury, refinement and capability plus near-silent fully electric propulsion; with effortlessly smooth and relaxed journeys,” said Thomas Mueller, Executive Director, Product Engineering. “To ensure we leave no stone uncovered, we are well underway with our physical testing and development programme, all designed at pushing Range Rover Electric to the extremes to ensure its capability remains unparalleled when it reaches you.”

Of course, predictably grandiose claims made for its refinement levels aside, the truth is that the car is very different underneath, and with a new, in-house developed all-electric propulsion system to incorporate, it will have no doubt proved a challenge both to perfect and to test - especially with the off-road ‘capabilities’ Land Rover continues to view as sacrosanct. Hence the understandable fuss it is making of otherwise conventional testing, including trips to 50-degree deserts in the Middle East, and, inevitably, -40 degrees inside the Arctic Circle. 

As you might expect, particular attention has been paid to battery performance (which will be supplied by a third party until JLR eventually switches to its own production) and the new Electric Drive Unit that comprises the transmission, electric motor and power electronics. Beyond the requirements of basic functioning in sub-zero temperatures, Land Rover says the frozen lakes of Sweden have again provided the perfect backdrop for its engineers to test the Range Rover Electric’s ability to ‘exceed its already renowned performance on low-grip surfaces’. 

The precise technical detail of how the EDUs are deployed (and the batteries configured) remains under wraps, though it does confirm that the new model ‘distributes the wheel slip management task directly to each individual electric drive control unit’ rather than using a traditional traction management system overseen by the ABS. Thanks to its own software code, Land Rover reckons it can reduce the torque reaction time at each wheel ‘from around 100 milliseconds, to as little as a 1 millisecond’. 

Whether or not that means there is one EDU per wheel is not made clear (at minimum there will be one assigned to each axle) although the manufacturer insists that by working ‘in harmony’ with the other stability and chassis systems, it has worked to significantly enhance the Range Rover driving experience. We’d wager that much time and energy has been spent on polishing the relationship between the three as Land Rover approaches the final stages of what it has previously described as ‘one of [its] most rigorous engineering sign-off programmes ever’. And with the electric G-Class set to be unveiled later this week, the stakes for its success couldn't be higher. We look forward to learning all about it in the coming months. Very definitely we're not the only ones. 

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• Wait list for new Range Rover Electric now open
• 2022 Range Rover D350 | PH Review

[Turini]

It will be horrendously expensive but as it’s still obviously a Range Rover it will come down to buyer preference as to which model they choose. For those who want/need an EV the purchasing choice will be their criteria but they’ll still be getting an RR.

Be good to know how it performs off road - not that many will be taken into the mud - as I’d expect it’s EV characteristics to suit the vehicle