Range Rover Velar Svelte SUV perfectly suits plug-in power

RANGE ROVER VELAR P400E

Plug-in electric power makes Land Rover’s most elegant vehicle smoother than ever – as well as creating a premium SUV with planet-friendly credentials to go with its award-winning style

ELECTRIC PROPULSION HAS PROGRESSED through the Land Rover range at a breathtaking pace, with almost all of the company’s engines now including at least some sort of mild hybrid technology. But it’s the company’s plug-in models that are making the real difference, offering as they do the opportunity to polish off a typical diet of everyday driving duties without burning any fossil fuel at all.

The Velar is among the more recent additions to the PHEV line-up, having arrived early this year with the now-familiar P400e powertrain. This 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 at £61,770 with this powertrain, it’s the second up in a run of four trim levels and it gives you everything most reasonable people could ask for – lots of luxuries, lots of media, lots of safety and no small amount of off-road driver aids. The latter doesn’t include low range, but there’s a long list of high-tech alternatives including Terrain Response; this model has coil springs, however, so its ground clearance can’t be hiked upwards the way it can on air. It does as standard, at least. Our test vehicle was equipped with an extensive range of options including the £1755 Dynamic Handling Pack, which includes Electronic Air Suspension as well as Adaptive Dynamics, Configurable Dynamics and All Terrain Progress Control. A major upgrade both on and off the road, then – and previous experience has shown that despite the lack of low range, the Velar is still a competent performer in muddy conditions.

Not that that’s what people buy it for. This is The Elegant One in the Range Rover family. Well, they’re all elegant in their own way but, whereas the fullfat Rangey is a lord of the manor and the Sport is a pro footballer, the Velar is David Niven. One doesn’t strive for elegance, nor is it thrust upon one; elegance comes from within.

And the Velar is indeed very elegant within, too. Leather is standard on the S model, but for an extra £1105 ours was trimmed in a combination of suedecloth and premium textile in Light Oyster and Dapple Grey, and thoroughly fine it looked too. There’s a lovely simplicity to its layout, with crisp horizontal lines on the dash and a pair of classy looking multi-function screens removing the need for any unsightly buttons or switches.

Most of all, the colour combination is bright, classy and slick without coming across as being wrapped up in its own importance. There’s a subtle Union Jack element to the pattern of the perforations in the seats which you might never even notice, and the textures and finishes throughout complement each other delightfully. During the first half of last year, our first experience of a Velar P400e was aboard a left-hand drive model with a horrible black and blue treatment which ruined it completely, but this time it was a perfect example of good a modern Land Rover can look and feel.

Rear-seat passengers get to enjoy it in plenty of room, too. And if you need to carry large loads, those seats drop close enough to flat for a major Ikea visit not to end up in disaster. The tailgate aperture is a little arched, but that should only be an issue if you’ve chosen the wrong Land Rover to use for shifting furniture around the place.

Getting behind the wheel, the drivetrain system has EV, Hybrid and Save settings, allowing you to prioritise electric or petrol power or combine both. The idea is that you can choose to run emissions-free around town or, on a long motorway journey, conserve the battery to use where it will have the most worthwhile effect.

This works well enough as a way of managing your vehicle’s efficiency. But in terms of performance, it doesn’t really matter which mode you’re in – it will always be extremely responsive on the throttle, leaping to attention the instant the pedal goes down. Even if you’re already bowling along at a good pace, it will still pick up speed without any hesitation.

It has the handling to match, with well controlled body movements giving it a poise that goes with its typically Range Rover level of grip. Torque Vectoring is standard on the Velar, adding yet another level of control in corners, and as well as cruising on the motorway with a wonderfully planted stability it’s very smooth and fluent on urban roads.

Obviously, it runs about town in EV mode with that eerie silence you expect from an electric vehicle. The engine is very quiet too, however – so

much so, in fact, that there’s not a lot of difference in the drivetrain’s refinement wherever the power’s coming from. There’s precious little to hear when the engine kicks in, and certainly no vibrations to feel.

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.

It’s the same story around town, where the absence of engine noise lets the road in. The optional air suspension helps here, damping out some of the thumps as you run through pot holes and over cats eyes, but there’s only so much it can do. Another option on our Velar was 21” rims and 265/45R21 tyres; Land Rover has got a long way beyond the point where low-profile sidewalls equate simply to high-profile fussing, but obviously less rubber means more work for the suspension and you do hear and feel it coming up into the cabin.

Off-road, as we mentioned above the Velar is more at home in rough and muddy conditions than its suave appearance and slick dynamics might have you expect. The hybrid powertrain is largely well suited here, too – though because the petrol engine is so very refined, the feeling of easing your way over the terrain in almost complete silence is one you can enjoy even if the battery is as flat as a pancake.

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 fight gravity without needing to raise its voice never fails to come as a surprise. We did find, however, that when you reach the crest at the top of a climb and back off, it seems to pick up speed for a moment before the hill descent control kicks in to bring it back. Maybe we’re just too used to the sort of engine braking you get in a basic old diesel, but the feeling was enough to be alarming at times.

Would this stop us from buying a P400e? No, because we wouldn’t be buying it to go off-road in. It’s nice to know that when you’re spending £69,310 (the price as tested) on something with a Range Rover badge on its bonnet, it does actually make a fist of living up to what those two words have come to mean, but we’d think it’s also quite nice to know that your own personal example of what this much money gets you will never have to prove it for itself.

For almost everyone who buys a Velar, its image is what matters. That’s no criticism, and the vehicle answers that call superbly. And for almost everyone who buys a P400e, what really matters is being able to drive to work, school or the shops on nothing but electric power.

Either that or they don’t care about anything other than avoiding a huge tax bill. But used correctly, this has the potential to be a tremendously economical 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. In every way, the Velar PHEV is a definitive example of a modern Range Rover.