EVOQUE CONVERTIBLE A REAL LOOKER,
It’s not quite the best of both worlds — there’s just 4 seats and space is tight — but you’ll have a world of fun with the top down
In stop-and-go traffic on the Harbor Freeway near downtown here, the driver in a sedan next to me leaned out the window as I rolled along and yelled, “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” I wondered. Put the top down on the new Range Rover Evoque convertible?
“I push a button,” I replied smugly. No, it turned out he wanted to know how he could get one because he thought it was one of the coolest and most unusual cars he had seen.
And so it went. All week long, I received more comments about the head-turning Evoque convertible than anything else I’ve driven lately.
I was mildly panicked when a traffic officer approached at Los Angeles International Airport. Did I linger too long in the pickup zone? Nope.
She just wanted a long look at the inside and to say she thought it was one of the most captivating vehicles she’d seen, and she sees them all. Ditto among the hotel parking attendants. They couldn’t stop talking about it.
Convertibles are not exactly an odd site on an 80-degree day in La La Land. But the reactions show what happens when a compact luxury SUV with gorgeous, swoopy lines is turned into a droptop.
Making an SUV a convertible only has been tried once in recent memory — Nissan’s Murano. And the result was not attractive from either a design or sales standpoint.
No wonder a friend who took a look referred to the Evoque convertible as “$80,000 of weirdness.” He overestimated the price by about $27,000 but was right about the weirdness.
Yet the Evoque ended up looking great with the top up or down, though the interior can feel a little bathtub-like for passengers. (It didn’t help that our test model came in porcelain white.)
Any shortcomings were made up by the ease with which I could raise and lower the canvas roof. One hold of the button does it all — the top, windows and latching.
The weirdness comes in on the issue of space. It’s an SUV, yet there’s seating for only four, and passengers complain the back is cramped. Only a couple of roller bags — enough for a weekend getaway — will fit into the trunk. Even the well-regarded BMW 4 Series convertible, a car, has 13 cubic feet of trunk space, as opposed to the Evoque’s 8.9 cubic feet.
One saving grace: There’s a hatch between the rear seats, handy for playthings such as skis.
Outdoorsy people will appreciate it, and not just for the fresh air. Even though it seems like it would be most at home pulling up to a valet stand, Evoque convertible comes billed as fully capable of going off-road. It can ford streams up to 20 inches and climb 45-degree hills.
Nice to know if you get lost in the countryside on the way to a polo match.
Evoque convertible’s 2-liter turbocharged engine has 240 horsepower, helped along by a 9speed transmission. The engine was quiet, though not breathtakingly powerful. I was impressed by how the engine stop-start system, aimed at saving gas at stop lights, showed up in a most unobtrusive way.
The convertible has an ample 10.2-inch touchscreen display in the center stack. While basic functions were divided into easy-to-figure-out quadrants, maneuvering audio choices and some other functions wasn’t always intuitive. There’s a volume knob, but it’s hard to find in darkness.
The system does the basics, but also the unusual. For instance, you can configure the color of the ambient lighting inside the car — from Amber Glow to Racing Red.
Weird, right?