No shortage of competition anymore.
It wasn’t all that long ago when the Range Rover was the default choice if you were looking for a pairing of automotive luxury and off-road capability. At the beginning of the millennium there began to emerge cars built from the mould of the venerable British off-roader, but none could really compare. Either too happy on the road or in the mud, the Range Rover’s claim to the throne remained uncontested for most of its life.
But that’s not the case anymore, though. Fast forward to today and nearly every brand under the sun has an SUV of some kind, and luxury marques too have not just encroached upon, but begun stealing territory that was once the unquestioned sovereign of the Range Rover. Competitors from mainstream luxury marques like Audi and BMW have either sprung-up or sharpened up, while upmarket ultra-luxury brands like Bentley and Rolls-Royce have (finally) begun to capitalise on the SUV craze.
Which means that the Range Rover, once a benchmark for luxury and class in its segment, is now crowded by peers. And so, for the next-generation of the Range Rover, the bosses in Solihull will aim to pack the new model with enough tech and luxury as humanly possible, and push the Range Rover even further into the luxury SUV territory in the hopes that it’ll be able to reclaim the marketshare it has since lost.
So important is the Range Rover’s reinvention that its ancestral plant in Solihull is being refitted and renovated to accommodate next-generation technologies, innovations, and construction methods. A new platform, a new set of powertrains, and even a new model await the Land Rover brand in the coming years, and the Range Rover will lead the way.
Critically, the new car is expected to be built off of an all-new Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) platform, which will go on to underpin all new Jaguar-Land Rover models in the future. MLA’s main benefit is having been designed from the outset to accept electrified powertrains, though it will also pack a significant weight saving over the D7u architecture that’s presently used under the skin of the current Range Rover.
That weight saving will be offset by the weight of batteries in hybrid models, though the next-generation of engines will do their bit to keep the weight down too. Jaguar-Land Rover is set to retire all of its Ford-sourced engines and instead employ new straight-six Ingenium petrol and diesel mills. These engines will be ready for use by the time the new Range Rover rolls around in 2021, replete with 48V mild-hybrid technology in certain variants to improve performance and economy.
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