Adventurous Brit Seeks Scandi Fling

It will pad around Sandton just fine. But we wanted to let it off the leash...

- Paul Horrell

At the unveiling of the Range Rover Velar, some of the mutterings weren’t dissimilar. People were upset that while Land Rover was plucking a name from history (the prototype Range Rovers in 1969 were called Velar), it was hardly mentioning the traditional strengths. Would the Velar actually be any good as a 4x4? At the celeb-packed London launch party, the words “unstoppable”, “useful” and “off-road” were hardly uttered by the Land Rover people, who spoke instead mostly about style (although they preferred “design”) and the new interface: a series of mysterious, ultra-glossy, black-’til-lit screens. Lots of wow factor for an indoor party at the Design Museum, yes, but how would it play in the wild?

Except Range Rover isn’t about tradition above all else. It’s actually been quite light on its feet. The previous Range Rover was the first all-aluminium SUV, and also had an early set of TFT instruments (years ahead of Audi). Range Rover has also brought us any number of chassis innovations for reconciliation of the grinding conflict between off-road capacity and on-road smarts.

And now this. The Velar’s controls and instruments are glassier than an Airbus’s cockpit. They consist of a TFT in the place of the instrument pack, a big head-up display, plus two big edgeless touchscreens in the car’s centre, the lower of which carries a pair of knurled twist-and-push knobs whose markings magically change with their context-dependent function. Even the steering wheel’s buttons are touch-sensitive and stroke-responsive, and their backlit typography and pictograms come and go with the situation and disappear to black when irrelevant. The system has fast data, serves as wi-fi, does fancy mapping and has a bunch of apps for remote control and travel and commerce.