First Drive Review
So what you really want to know is how it feels to drive a Range Rover with nobody in it. Compared with the outgoing Range Rover, that’s how this new one should feel: empty, unladen. By building what it describes as the world’s first SUV with an all-aluminum unibody, Land Rover has cut a claimed 700 pounds from its flagship; that’s the mass of five average-size Europeans or 4.1 Americans.
Can you feel the difference? Definitely. This new model is a milestone in industry efforts to arrest the death-spiral of ever-increasing weight, complexity, and consumption that has afflicted the SUV more than most. Automakers’ hands might have been forced by public opinion and fierce governmental fuel-economy and emissions rules, but let’s not argue with the result: better cars for us to drive. And few demonstrate the myriad benefits of making a vehicle lighter and stiffer as dramatically as Land Rover has with this new Range Rover.
Although ownership now rests with India’s Tata Motors and the very element from which it’s crafted has changed, this remains a Range Rover, true to a clear, bright set of styling and engineering principles that have been followed consistently since 1970. Successfully, too. In its last full year of production, the 10-year-old outgoing model defied the usually immutable laws of automotive sales gravity by posting an astonishing 21-percent global sales increase.
Land Rover wasn’t going to mess with that formula, and it hasn’t. Despite the diet, it’s still the ultimate luxury off-roader—dispatching challenging terrain, dispatched to nights at the opera. And it still hews to design attributes that have always made driving one a distinctive experience: the throne-like, command driving position; the squared-off, castellated front corners; the clamshell hood; the side gills; and the flying body-colored roof.
It’s all there in the new one, of course, and it looks good in aluminum. But the styling—overseen by design director and chief creative officer Gerry McGovern—doesn’t have quite the impact of the previous model, either by comparison with its peers or in its simple physical presence. The old car looked as bluff and upright as the White Cliffs of Dover. Here’s a gentler, softer, more sculpted, less arrogant Range Rover. It’s also the most aerodynamic version ever, though that’s hardly saying much.
