Velar The Viking Vessel

The newest Range Rover traversed fjords and mountains on a 370km road trip in Norway, home of the Vikings.

- Toh Yong Chuan

BRITISH carmaker Land Rover picked Norway, famed for its Viking history, for journalists to test its newest car. The location could not be more apt.

While Vikings may be just a chapter of Nordic history, the new Range Rover Velar has everything a modern adventurer with a Viking spirit will want.

The famed hardiness of Viking long ships has taken Viking raiders and traders across the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean as far west as Newfoundland and across the Mediterranean Sea to what is modern-day Turkey and Middle East.

For this road trip in Norway, our “Viking longship” was the Velar.

Viking long ships have a distinctive design – long, graceful body with a dragon-shaped bow and a single main mast.

Likewise, the Velar has an unmistakable Range Rover look.

Range Rover is the luxury arm of Land Rover, renowned for making off-road cars that can conquer harsh terrains even before sports utility vehicles (SUVs) became the worldwide craze they are today.

The Velar is the fourth model in the Range Rover stable. It does not have a predecessor. Land Rover calls it plainly as a “new type” of Range Rover.

The carmaker dug deep into its historical archive to come up with the unfamiliar name which is derived from the Latin word velaris, which means a veil or a curtain. Velar was the code word Land Rover used in 1969 when it was working on its first Range Rover prototype in secret.

The Velar sits in-between the Range Rover Sport and the Evoque. (Land Rover’s use of the word Sport can be confusing. The Range Rover Sport is not a sportier version of the flagship Range Rover. It is a different car, a smaller SUV, just as the Discovery Sport is a different and smaller vehicle compared to the Discovery.)