It’s official: an all-electric Range Rover is going to arrive in 2024. What’s more Land Rover has announced plans for another five all-electric vehicles over the next five years. And by the end of the decade every one of the company’s cars will have an all-electric variant.
All this means the people who moved to the country and decided they needed a 4x4 behemoth to dominate the country roads, will be able to do so in a less noisy and polluting fashion.
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This announcement was made as Land Rover unveiled the 2022 Range Rover, which is itself built on a new flexible architecture that will form the basis of future Land Rover cars — including hybrids and all-electric models.
Unfortunately, we don’t know a great deal about the upcoming EV. Originally it was expected to share its underpinnings with the all-electric Jaguar XJ, but that has since been cancelled and it’s not entirely clear what the future holds.
However, the 2024 Range Rover EV will aim to compete with other SUVs on the market, including the BMW iX and the Mercedes EQS SUV, though isn’t likely to feature a design that’s hugely different from an ICE-powered Range Rover you’d see on the roads right now.
After all, Land Rover is keeping internal combustion engines around for quite some time. The goal is for its all-electric sales to hit 60% by 2030, rather than announcing a definite end death date for its ICE models.
Interestingly, hydrogen may also be on the cards, with Land Rover programme director Nick Miller telling Autocar that the architecture can support a hydrogen powertrain. Though given the obvious issues of there being almost zero hydrogen infrastructure, we’ll have to wait and see how likely that will be.
Still we can use the 2022 Range Rover, which will launch with a mild hybrid variant followed by a plug-in hybrid model in 2023, to speculate as to what the electric Range Rover might have to offer.
The 2022 model packs in wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, as wireless charging pad in the center console, and an infotainment system that is fully integrated with Amazon’s Alexa. That means not only do you have everything Alexa can do, including read you news or control your smart home, you are also able to use the voice assistant to control the inner workings of your car.
That infotainment system will also feature a lot of screen space, with a 13.1-inch curved display with haptic feedback and a 13.7-inch driver display. There’s also an independent 11.4-inch rear infotainment display, and all screens will offer HDMI input and Wi-Fi — provided you connect them to a hotspot. An additional 8-inch touch control panel is also an option, offering controls for various seat functions should you want them.
As decadent and luxurious as that all sounds, the haptic feedback is particularly noteworthy. since it means you get some sort of confirmation when you’ve done something on the touchscreen. It’s not going to be as good as a button, no touchscreen ever will be, but it could be better than the glossy unresponsive screens you see in cars at the moment.
The 2022 Range Rover also comes with new electrical vehicle architecture that allows wireless communication. In other words, it can receive over the air updates to gain new features or improve existing ones.
It’ll likely be a while before we find out much more about the Range Rover EV. But if Land Rover’s current plans are anything to go by it’s going to shape up to be one fancy car. We just have to hope it’ll come with the range to complement everything.
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