DRIVEN
RANGE ROVER VELAR S P400E Land Rover’s range-wide roll-out of plug-in hybrid technology continues apace, as its most elegant SUV becomes the latest model to add plug-in power to its existing list of abilities
THE ROLL-OUT of Land Rover’s plug-in hybrid technology continues apace, with the Range Rover Velar becoming the latest model to gain a PHEV option. It uses the P400e powertrain, which combines a 2.0-litre petrol engine with a 17.1kWh battery and 48-volt motor to develop a combined 404bhp and 472lbf.ft. We tested the vehicle in S form. Listing from £51,465, this is the second up in a run of four trim
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levels, and it includes plenty for your money – including Terrain Optimisation 2, Wade Sensing and All Terrain Progress Control, but not low range. It does have four-wheel drive, though, you’ll be relieved to hear. Something else the test vehicles on Land Rover’s launch event also had was a bizarre two-tone interior featuring black and dark blue leather that might appeal to some taste’s but certainly didn’t do anything for
ours. The phrase ‘ruins a nice car’ appeared in our notes. Premium suedecloth fabric is available on this model for about a grand more, and we wouldn’t think twice, but each to their own – and there are also several very nice other leather options available that don’t require you to spend any more money (and won’t play havoc with your Velar’s trade-in value), so no harm done. With that early digression out of the way, let’s concentrate on what the P400e is like to drive. The short answer is that it’s very impressive. To go into a little more depth, it picks up speed without any hesitation, even if you’re already bowling along at pace. This happens whatever mode you’re in, too. The system has EV, Hybrid and Save settings, allowing you to prioritise electric or petrol power of combine both; what we found was that in terms of performance, it doesn’t really matter which you’re in – it will always be extremely responsive on the throttle,
leaping to attention the instant the pedal goes down. Obviously, it runs about town in EV mode with that eerie silence you expect from an electric vehicle. The engine is very quiet too, though – in fact we found that there’s little difference in the drivetrain’s refinement wherever the power’s coming from. The 2.0-litre unit sings out when you give it the boot, but it’s not a nasty noise – and once again it’s very well muted when you settle to a cruise. This does, however, serve to highlight that there’s rather a lot of road noise at speed, and a good bit of wind noise too. There’s a lot of road noise around town, too, which is just as evident whether or not you’re running solely on electric power. And we felt a constant fussing from the suspension on roads we’d have expected it to deal with better. This particular Velar runs on coil springs rather than air, though our instinct was to look more to the dampers or possibly the
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