Car Review: Range Rover Velar

It takes a special kind of chutzpah to re-invent the car door handle, and Jaguar Land Rover, surging ahead as it is, is just such a company. You may have been intrigued by the TV ads for the new Range Rover Velar, their latest model, during which you get a fleeting glance of this little engineering breakthrough. It is much more impressive to observe in real life.

With a push of a button on a remote, the car doesn’t just unlock all the doors (routine), but the door handle actually extends itself out to present itself the car’s occupants, like some sort of automotive butler (extraordinary). When the doors lock the handles retract and lie flush with the bodywork, giving the Velar an especially smooth finish to complement its smooth overall demeanour.

I don’t think it is possible to overstate how much childlike pleasure this feature excites among those who encounter it for the first time (and for some time afterwards, too). Grown-ups who might otherwise be worrying about their jobs, mortgage, kids’ education or all that plastic in the oceans are instead transfixed, if only for a few precious moments, by some mechanical trick attached to a rich man’s toy, which, after all, is what a Range Rover amounts to. It would almost be enough to turn a Corbynista into a capitalist, if they could only accept the link between free markets and technical innovation. There’s surplus value in them handles, for sure.

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I’m sorry to dwell on the door handle issue, but it does tend to dominate the Range Rover Velar experience somewhat. You only really get distracted from it by the other sybaritic delights you encounter once you get inside. For some reason it seems only to be Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo who are trying really hard at interior design.

Other marques such as, say, Lexus and Audi have long pioneered high quality fit and finish, while the Peugeot-Citroen-DS combine are also being a bit avant garde, but it is remarkable how few car firms are really majoring on this aspect of design. After all it is, to use an old motor trade expression, the kind of thing that will “surprise and delight” a prospective customer in the showroom, and have them hooked long before they go on a test drive or read about an emissions fixing scandal.

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So the Velar has a fresh, clean, highly styled interior dominated by two large touchscreens that control most of the many functions at the disposal of its users, all intuitively available and with certain important functions – lane assist or the heated steering wheel for example – clearly accessible on the steering wheel.

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Passengers and drivers alike will be particularly impressed by the Velar’s seats; these are not only trimmed in some fine-quality leather (not the very best, which derive from Italy, but good enough), heated or ventilated depending on the season, plus heated arm rests, and infinitely (electrically) adjustable for height and rake; but they also feature a massage function. Not just that, even: the massage is available in five main settings: Wave, Up, Down, Shoulder, Lumbar. They work well, in fact, though I can’t quite compute the Land Rover claim that they are “hot stone”.

But you see what I mean about the designers at Range Rover trying to emulate the kind of kit and ambience their wealthy buyers enjoy at home or down at the spa. For them, perhaps, a hot stone massage as you’re scooting up the M4 it isn’t such a big deal, but for some of us, even those of us who’ve enjoyed this sort of thing before, it is still a welcome novelty. I was also intrigued to see that rear seat passengers can move the front seats forward (when they are unoccupied), which is the sort of aristocratic touch I’d only seen in a Bentley, Rolls-Royce or Maybach before. Trickle down, you might say; maybe it’ll turn up on a Corsa in a few years’ time.

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If the interior features are there to be used, the mechanical ones are, almost certainly, there not to be used. On the 10-inch touchscreens you find all the connectivity and DAB stuff along with the climate control and trip computer – but also some exciting icons that invite you to set the Velar’s air suspension and gearing for mud ruts, for sand, for ice and for normal road use respectively, with all the usual four-wheel drive technology you’d expect in a traditional, and a modern, Land Rover. It is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption to own a car that is capable of finding its way across the Kalahari or Siberia, but which only ever has to navigate the kerb in the car park of a Cotswolds branch of Waitrose. Velar is, in case you were wondering, the project name for the original Range Rover as it was being developed around 1970; the Velar, as with all Range Rovers, retains many of the original design cues and, indeed, the off-road capability and extensive use of weight-saving aluminium. The only actual flaw I found was that it tends to steam up a bit of a cold morning, the demister rectifying things only slowly.

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As an afterthought, I ought to add that the Velar, basically a sister model of the Jaguar F-Pace SUV, goes, and stops, exceptionally well. Avoiding the diesel options – whose engines are well suited to the car’s character and bulk, and will deliver reasonable running costs – the supercharged petrol V6 I tested had all the urge you’d need and delivered its power mostly in a progressive and predictable manner. The car, surprisingly, sometimes clunked itself into drive, rather than gliding as it set off, and it’s also true that a good idea of the performance isn’t much use around town because of the vehicle’s sheer size. Indeed, as with the general trend towards car inflation, having all these SUVs clogging up urban areas is becoming a bit of a serious issue.

Working (not living, I add) around Chelsea, not so long ago I witnessed a traffic jam at a busy junction; not such a strange event but this was a first – every single vehicle involved was some variant of Range Rover, from (comparatively) little Evoques, though various Sports and Classics, and the “P38” models from the 1990s, apparently not favoured nowadays. A nice vignette, I thought.

Soon the Velar, too, will be taking its rightful place there and in every chichi district in the world. Range Rovers, they tells us, are Britain’s leading luxury export, and, whether you like them or not, are probably the biggest single weapon in the battle to make Brexit work. Just as well, then, that the Velar is such a covetable product, with a price tag to match.