Range Rover Velar

So just back from a very pleasant long weekend in northern Italy where, for once, we got a really decent rental car in the shape of a rather lovely brand-new Velar, courtesy of Hertz Gold, thereby slightly redeeming themselves after our Panda debacle over the summer. And, given the surprisingly wintry weather, especially welcome.

It was absolutely brand new – which is always great but also intimidating as it does mean that every single scratch is incontrovertibly yours.

Anyway, obviously being a rental, it was only in boggo D180 flavour, but on the plus side it was at least in R-Dynamic S trim, so it didn’t have the very teensy shirt-button wheels that make some Velars look so terribly under-wheeled. As per the photos, it was in an attractive shade of mid-grey with a black leather interior with white contrast stitching, which looked nicer than it sounds. I could live without the bronze trim inserts though, and the wheels were still a touch too small despite being 19”.

For those who can’t be bothered to read any further, the long and short of it was, inevitably, that despite being long-standing SUV-sceptics, we both really liked it a lot. It’s still a bigger car than is strictly necessary but it’s significantly smaller than a full-on SUV and not nearly as tall either. I could find reasons to have something this size in my life whereas a full-fat Rangie or even a Sport still seems very OTT. It’s also a strikingly handsome design overall – there are aspects I am not mad about (I find the front simultaneously a bit too thrusting and yet bland, and I didn’t like the drab dark grey wheels) – but it has a lovely profile and some great detailing. It got lots of oohs and aahs from friends when we arrived, which is doubtless why a lot of people buy these cars.

The interior is of course lovely as is the way with recent LR products. Nicely styled, very sleek and modern, with nice materials and just generally a great place to be. It feels much more luxurious than my 4GC. This one was a bit “coal hole” with black leather, black headlining, black trim and no glass roof, but very nice nevertheless. The central console is a masterpiece of modernity, with the upper nav screen motoring to a more upright position when you turn on the ignition, even if it takes a while to work out how to get everything to work. We spent quite a while trying to get the Apple Carplay to work (Hertz having not seen fit to activate the standard Nav – it said it was missing a SIM) and fathoming the climate controls took my wife a while. You also get just enough of the raised driving position consumers seem to like without it feeling overly like a lorry – the sense of captaining it is retained but you can also lower the seat and actually drive it too. There’s enough space for five normal-sized adults and it has a large boot – although it is quite long and shallow – reaching anything right at the back of the boot without dirtying your legs and coat on the rear bumper is impossible. In R-Dynamic trim, it seemed to have most of the necessary FG, including electric memory seats, a reversing camera and sundry other gadgets. The only absence I really noticed was a lack of heated seats. I looked long and hard for a switch (it was 2 degrees outside!) but never found one.

It’s also extremely comfortable and relaxing, once you get accustomed to the dimensions – nerve-wracking when your first stint at the wheel is on the 4th floor of a multi-storey carpark! We left Milan about 10pm on Friday night, and drove nearly 170kms down to near Alba in at times soaking wet and near freezing conditions, and the Velar just crushed the trip with imperious ease. Even this base-engined diesel model swishes down the autostrada at the sorts of +++ speeds that you wouldn’t dare drive at on a UK motorway, with quite the best headlights I’ve experienced spearing laser-like into the darkness of the middle distance and clearing all other stray road users from your path with a flicker of main beam. In fact main beam was almost too bright, particularly when we arrived in the hills near Alba and found them draped in nearly 10cms of snow. It was a very confidence-inspiring car to drive. I found myself thinking that it would be a fabulous car to traverse the continent in. That added sense of the ability to carry on come-what-may whilst still feeling like you are driving a car was very seductive.

The base 2.0TDi engine is interesting. The car must carry a fair amount of sound-insulation, because from inside you don’t really hear the engine’s dieselly thrashings unless you try and cane it. For example, it cruises very quietly at around 2000rpm at 85-90ish with the ZF auto in 8th. But manoeuvre at low speed with a window open and it does sounds a bit noisily agricultural. In terms of performance, it’s a typical smaller TDi in the sense that initial pick-up, particularly at low speed, is really quite good, but it eventually starts to run out of ideas and puff when asked to haul at higher speeds. Performance when clogging it onto a motorway from a slip road is adequate, but if you really floor it say at a motorway cruise, regrettably not much happens barring a lot of slightly mooing diesel noises and a gradual increase in speed.

The reason I say it is interesting is because obviously the D180 is the base engine and 180bhp is not much to ferry around a porky Velar. But I can quite imagine how 90% of drivers, and certainly anyone who isn’t particularly a speedfreak, would probably actually find it perfectly fine. No it was not as effortless as I would like, but it wasn’t in any way actually a slug either. And that was a surprise, particularly since a glance at an Autocar review of a Velar with the more powerful D240 version of the same engine slated it for being sluggish, and this engine was presumably still very tight.

Fuel consumption, given it’s a touch underpowered and this was the car’s first ever tank of diesesel, was ok. We did 500kms and I got 40 litres in when it came to refuelling, with the range showing as 700kms once re-filled, and I definitely used what performance was available. That’s around 34mpg. Then again that’s partly the advantage of an 8spd auto – a fast cruise is more economical than you might expect. As a side-bar, one of my colleagues in Milan has the supercharged P380 version and says it drinks fuel like it is has a hole in the tank, so I reluctantly guess that the 3.0 TDi is probably the sweet spot.

In terms of driving, of course it is still an SUV which means you take a more circumspect approach to attacking the twisties, especially since it was cold and snowy in Piemonte. But LR have produced a pretty excellent compromise in my view – it corners decently flatly without much roll and generally reacts well without compromising on that sense of smooth and poised progress. Not much steering feedback but that’s no great surprise and the steering was pretty precise for an SUV. It also rides very well – almost velvety on a good surface and always cushioned and smooth – my sister-in-law and nephew commented quickly on that as admiring rear seat passengers. I suppose the smaller wheels with ample sidewalls helped although I’d guess this one had the standard steel suspension as I couldn’t find any controls for air suspension nor any way to raise or lower it. A quick peer at the sidewalls tells me it was on Pirelli Scorpione all seasons tyres and grip was abundant. And as you can see, I found some mud and it dealt with that sure-footedly too.

Things I didn’t like? The rotary gear selector is gimmicky and I was forever turning it the wrong way unless I actually looked at it. The actual instrument binnacle has white-lit analogue dials either side of a smallish digital display that looks curiously old-fashioned and ever so slightly cheap, which impression is accentuated by the unfavourably contrast with those very slick Apple-esque central console screens. And the reversing camera is terrible. Rather than the reasonably true and decent resolution image I get in my BMW, this has (a) rather poor resolution and (b) a weird sort of fishbowl effect rather like the peephole in your front door, which means that the images of things either side of your rear bumper bend inwards. Repeated glances in the wing-mirrors are needed to reassure yourself that the cars parked either side are actually parked parallel to you and a safe distance away. This makes reverse-parking decidedly fraught, which is surely not the point of a reversing camera. And lastly it’s a shame it doesn’t have the split rear tailgate of other bigger Range Rovers.

But overall, I could, I am almost ashamed to say as a Londoner who absolutely doesn’t need an SUV, easily see myself owning one of these (admittedly with a bigger engine and more FG) and thoroughly enjoying doing so. Even my wife, who is a committed SUV-hater, commented on how nice it was for a change to have a rental car that was “nicer than our car” and asked, as we scythed through the darkness back towards Linate airport last night, “so I guess this will be our next car?”…

Not sure about that. When we got back to the carpark at T5, we found the 4GC looking impossibly low and sleek next to a 68-plate full-fat Range Rover and my wife was instantly back to preferring the BMW. “It is just more elegant”, said she. Indeed it is and, as was impossible to ignore on the way home, still a much better car to drive in all respects barring ride quality. But a Velar with the performance of the 440i would be a very fine thing indeed.