Range Rover takes flagship into EV era

Range Rover’s first electric flagship can pick its way over rocks using a single pedal, with a cabin designed to make the outside world feel, well, a world away.

“It’s the pivotal moment that we are heading into now, after 56 years of the brand building authentic credibility around refinement, calmness, magic-carpet ride, breadth of capability, beautiful reductive design, effortlessness,” said Martin Limpert, Range Rover’s global managing director.

“And now we bring a powertrain into Range Rover and Range Rover Sport that enhances all of this. It’s the first time in the history of this company that we bring full electric, which we believe is a perfect powertrain for these values. That keeps me super excited.”

Limpert’s enthusiasm made the scale of the project feel personal.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with GadgetWheels at JLR’s Gaydon headquarters in the English Midlands, he was visibly animated by what his engineers had achieved and what it would feel like for owners to drive it.

I drove the Range Rover Electric and Sports Electric on Gaydon’s off-road course, where the ease with which they crossed changing surfaces made the experience both fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable. (see features here)

Range Rover Sport Electric turns up the fun

Range Rover Electric makes off-roading a delight.

The visit took me from the engineering centre at Gaydon to Wolverhampton, where JLR has upgraded its propulsion factory to make the electric drive units. Limpert’s responsibilities extend across that investment and the experience of the person behind the wheel. His description of a Range Rover cabin starts with the people who spend their working lives dealing with demands on their time.

“Our customers are the leaders of this world, life’s leaders, always confronted with information overload, hectic, no time,” he said.

“For 56 years we’ve been building, especially with the original Range Rover, what we call the calm sanctuary, where the cabin of the car is your safe space, where your mind is protected. You almost feel like you’re in a cocoon.”

The electric motors deliver power from a standstill, and the traction system adjusts their output as grip changes. JLR says cabin noise is up to seven decibels lower than in the V8 model. The battery beneath the floor lowers the centre of gravity, helping a large SUV remain stable as the surface changes.

Building capability in-house

The electric vehicle retains the cabin and load space of the familiar Range Rover. Beneath it, JLR has developed its own battery and electric drive units. It had experience of building an electric car through the Jaguar I-PACE, but the flagship’s requirements sent it back to its own engineers.

“Then you look around: is the technology that we need for that available off the shelf? We understood it wasn’t, especially when we talk about EDUs and batteries,” Limpert said. EDU is JLR’s shorthand for an electric drive unit, combining the motor with the hardware that delivers its power to the wheels.

“So building that capability in-house, from designing, developing, testing and engineering, and in the end manufacturing – of course you learn a lot on that journey, and there are setbacks.”

At Gaydon, live battery packs undergo vibration and temperature testing in a laboratory built for the electric programme. The work extends to sustained heavy loads, including towing, and to the pressure changes that occur when motors and batteries heat up and cool down. The vehicle’s breathers have to function while preserving its ability to enter deep water.

“What we mean with no compromise is, it’s still the best, most elevated Range Rover you can get everywhere in the world,” Limpert said. “It will deliver 850Nm of torque. It will provide you 900mm of wading depth. It will have the fastest-responding traction-management system. It will have the quietest cabin. It will have the towing capacity that you expect of a Range Rover.”

Simon Fairbrother, programme chief for Range Rover and Range Rover Sport Electric, has led the engineering programme for five years. His example of the suspension work puts Limpert’s promise into the context of the rocks at Gaydon.

“Range Rover’s got 450mm of wheel articulation, and that’s one of the things that gives us the off-road capability,” Fairbrother said. Wheel articulation is the movement that lets tyres keep contact with the ground as the body passes over rocks or ruts.

“We could have said, ‘Oh yeah, well, it’s an electric vehicle. People’s expectations are going to be different. We’ll just restrict the wheel articulation and it’ll be fine.’ But we didn’t. We changed the suspension component so that we maintained that 450mm of wheel articulation.”

Fairbrother has a dry wit to go with a deep intelligence beneath every comment. He calls the two electric vehicles his “third and fourth children”, and the affection is easy to understand after five years spent bringing them into production. He can get into the geometry of a driveshaft without losing the person listening, then cheerfully admit: “I don’t have lots of friends, believe it or not, because I’m always here.”

Fairbrother’s experience includes a spell on the production line building the Classic Range Rover at Solihull in 1993.

“So my claim to fame is I’ve worked on every single generation of Range Rover in one way, shape or another,” he said.

Deep water demands

Deep water called for its own engineering work. Removing the engine’s air intake does not remove the need to manage pressure as components heat up and cool down.

“Electric drive units and batteries have breathers the same. So we’ve routed those breathers so that you still get all of that off-road wading capability on the electric car,” Fairbrother said.

“If you were to press me, the only compromise we’ve had to make is we can’t offer a seven-seat version.”

Limpert’s brief includes the experience of using the electric car in places where charging is straightforward and in those where it demands more, shall we say, planning? South Africa is part of that discussion, and he draws a distinction between suburban houses with space for a charger and apartments where installation becomes complicated.

“In markets or regions where our customers very often live in suburban regions in detached houses, it’s not a problem to install your own home charger,” he said. “But then there will, of course, be places like Tokyo, Singapore, maybe also some of your cities in Cape Town or Johannesburg, where it’s apartment living and the installation of a home charger is not as easy.”

JLR’s charging app is intended to give owners access to providers through a single account. The charging networks available in each market will determine how useful that arrangement is to local buyers.

“These are the things that we have to look into and make sure that we work with the right providers in the markets to assure we have a good, solid, fast-charging infrastructure for our customers,” Limpert said. “Make sure that this infrastructure is integrated with our Range Rover app, so that even if they can’t charge at home, their charging experience with that network is as frictionless as possible.”

Said Fairbrother: “Many of those people, the more affluent people in South Africa, have already got solar power and battery banks and so on. So for them the car’s perfect.

“Range Rover Electric is absolutely a pivotal moment for us, but I think we mustn’t forget we’re not talking about taking anything away. We’re talking about adding choice.”

Buyers will also retain options of plug-in hybrids and other powertrains. JLR has prepared its Solihull production line, said Limpert, to give it room to respond to demand country by country.

“We know that the penetration rate of full-electric Range Rovers will be different in the different regions of this world,” he said. “That was part of the construct right from the beginning, and we’re fine with this, because we can build the plug-in hybrid, the mild hybrid, the electric vehicle, all on the same plant in Solihull, on the same production line.”

This is Part 1 of a 3-part feature by ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK on the launch of the new Range Rover Electric and Range Rover Sports Electric vehicles at JLR headquarters in Gaydon, England. See the other stories here:

Range Rover Electric makes off-roading a delight

Range Rover Sport Electric turns up the fun

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.