Range Rover Velar PHEV Suave 4x4 the latest to become a plug-in hybrid

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 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 refi nement 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

The Velar’s cabin has always been a slick, calm and pleasing place to be, and that’s as true as ever today. The black and blue colour scheme on our test vehicle defi nitely won’t be to everyone’s taste (it’s far less subtle than these pictures suggest), but there are plenty of other options available and done right, it’s beautiful

265/45R21 tyres for an explanation. Either way, we’ve come to expect a much more refi ned ride from any Land Rover, let alone one with a Range Rover badge on its bonnet.

The coil springs certainly don’t detract from what the Velar can do offroad. Nor does the hybrid drivetrain, though the feeling of overing rough ground in near-complete silence is one you can enjoy whether it’s running in full-EV mode or on petrol power. Obviously, however, the electric motor delivers torque in a way no internal combustion engine ever can, so it feels utterly effortless at low speeds – even when you’re scaling sharp crests or longer, steep hills, the vehicle’s ability to fi ght gravity without needing to raise its voice never fails to come as a surprise. surprise.

We did notice, however, that when we backed off over the crest at the top of a climb, be it a proper hill or just the sort of raised tree root that asks for an instinctive squeeze of the throttle, the vehicle seemed to surge forward for a moment before the hill descent control kicked in to bring it back. Perhaps this is something you’d get used to, given the chance, and our assumption is that it’s down to a lack of drivetrain inertia and/or engine compression to slow it down the way a lifetime of petrol and in particular diesel-engined 4x4s has trained us to expect, but it certainly kept building momentum for longer than we expected in way that was alarming at times.

The number of people who decide against a Velar P400e based on this should certainly be zero, because even if it’s a quirk of the vehicle rather than us just not having had enough time to get used to it, the chances of it being relevant in any sort of meaningful way should be… well, zero again. Far better to concentrate on another zero, which is the amount of emissions coming out of the tailpipe when you’re driving to work, school or the shops on nothing but electric power. Use it correctly, and this has the potential to be a tremendously economical premium SUV – and one which sets itself apart from the crowd by dishing up some genuine off-road

ability to go with its wide-ranging off-road skills. Most of all, that £51,465 price tag actually looks like pretty strong value for what is a totally convincing premium SUV whose style and panache are backed up by seriously good all-round abilities and, in this form, tiny running costs. We weren’t impressed by the ride quality of the vehicle we drove, and its interior proved beyond doubt that taste is a personal thing – but overall, while it’s hardly cheap, you can see the Velar P400e making sense in all should certainly be zero, because dishing up some genuine off-road sorts of ways. sorts of ways.