Range Rover PHEV
Now with a battery. (Why?)
‘SO, WHO BUYS a plug-in hybrid Range Rover?’ I asked a senior JLR bod. ‘ Well, I haven’t got their names,’ he snapped back – deploying what seemed an unnecessarily stout salvo of huff in riposte to an innocuous query elicited by the pronouncement that some 20 per cent of Range Rover buyers will henceforth opt for the PHEV variant.
One opulently cosseting smear on tarmac and an occasionally challenging squelch off it later, I’m still none the wiser... Hunting down a £35k deal on a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV with the tax-friendly promise of 41g/km and 166mpg I vaguely get. But if you’re forking out over 100 grand to get your nose higher in the air than anyone else, do you care about the price of petrol? You’d better, because, despite a quoted average of 101mpg, my day’s driving rewarded me with 21.4mpg. And there’s the rub: must we now wave goodbye to engineering for excellence in favour of engineering to exploit ill-conceived regulation?
The 31 miles of all-electric driving is so quiet that Land Rover has installed a ‘synthesised sound for pedestrian alert’ which cannot be heard from on board. What can be heard, though, is the wince-worthy rasp of metal-on-metal under regenerative braking. Land Rover has also gone to a deal of trouble to ensure the 85kW (114bhp) electric motor doesn’t deliver maximum torque from zero rpm when off-roading; what’s 6.8 seconds to 62mph sauce for the goose on the loose isn’t such an asset for the gander getting to grips with the gloop.
The 2.0-litre turbo makes an unseemly racket in getting two and half tonnes moving with any alacrity, while dealing with the extra weight of the batteries elicits an over-tough ride by Range Rover standards, and brake pedal modulation lacks finesse.
All of which hardly adds to the long list of attributes we already admire in the stock Range Rover.