Ed Evans
EVS and hindsight
THERE’S no word yet about an electric Land Rover, but they have to come, eventually – Skoda and MG are already offering Discovery Sport-sized EVS capable of over 200 miles range. But that’s not enough, and the struggle to develop an affordable battery that will give EVS a practical driving range appears to make only slow progress. The prospect of four-wheel electric drive is exciting, and no doubt technology from the all electric Jaguar IPACE will spill over to our favourite brand, but can a battery be developed to power a Land Rover for long distances, including energy-sapping off-road driving?
Land Rover has a plan to side-step that issue – look out for its upcoming hydrogen-powered fuel cell concept vehicle. Hydrogen-fuelled Land Rovers may seem a long shot, given that we don’t yet have a hydrogen infrastructure, but much can change in the nine years before the internal combustion engine (ICE) cut-off point in 2030. In my opinion, Land Rover has historically been slow in showing new technologies, but that can have advantages. Look at dual-mass flywheels: other manufacturers had real issues with those, but by the time Land Rover introduced them on the Td5 models the teething problems had been sorted and Land Rover’s version worked as intended. If JLR’S hydrogen research is successful, Land Rover may just step in late with an even cleaner electric vehicle solution whose driving range is limited only by the size of its hydrogen fuel tank.
Given that we’ve spent the last 120 years or so developing the internal combustion engine, only to find it a failure for the times we live in, maybe we should have bitten the electric bullet back in the early 1900s. At that time, electric cars were preferred over petrol types because they were simple, more reliable, cleaner, quieter and free of exhaust soot and smell. In 1900, New York had nearly 1600 electric cars and only around 900 ICE models. What killed electric cars then was a problem that still exists today: range anxiety. If the subsequent 100 years of petrol/diesel engine development had been spent on developing those early electric cars, we might already be enjoying long distance off-road electric transport – if only we’d seen the future...