2024 Range Rover Evoque Reduces to the Max

As Stanford University's Rob Kapilow explains, British art critic Richard Wollheim in 1965 "coined the term 'minimal art' to describe art that reduced its materials and forms to fundamentals." The phrase became the catchall "minimalism," which became—and remains—a vital ethos of Western design and culture. You can hear it in composer John Cage's "4:33," which puts a pianist at a piano for four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. You can sit in it with Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair or anywhere at Ikea. You can sleep and shower in it, in modern hotel rooms that make Sphinxian riddles of turning off the lights and turning on the water. And you can drive it if you buy a Range Rover.

Evoque's Exterior Design

The British SUV maker prefers the term "reductive" design to minimalism. The 2024 Range Rover Evoque shows the result is the same no matter the term—better execution than in that boutique hotel, albeit just as stingy with switches and buttons.

Applied to the Evoque's exterior, reductive is a warning to expect changes that need a jeweler's loupe to identify. The grille swaps the previous hexagonal mesh for artful dashed lines, the Evoque now expressing the family genes as passed down by the paternoster Range Rover. On either side of the grille, slimmer adaptive headlights match the units used on the Velar. Each lamp houses four small lighting units, each unit housing 67 LEDs that can alter their light pattern so as not to blind drivers ahead.

Arroios Grey, Corinthian Bronze, and Tribeca Blue join the exterior paint menu, Corinthian Bronze also available as a contrasting roof color alongside Narvik Black.

Evoque's Minimalist Interior

Reductive design makes its real stand inside. In our review of the baby Range Rover from 2022, we wrote, "The Evoque's interior mirrors the clean design of its exterior, which is unfortunate because that means most of the knobs and buttons were banished in favor of touchscreens and capacitive switches." For 2024, touchscreen is now singular, the former infotainment and HVAC displays absorbed into an 11.4-inch unit higher up on the instrument panel. And the buttons and knobs? Mortal enemies of the reductive, erased as thoroughly as Leia's Alderaan.

Now that a single screen needs to lift the weight of two, there are two speed-dial menus along the sides of the 11.4-inch display and a quick menu for climate controls at the bottom. As before, Range Rover says approximately 80 percent of functions are within two taps of the home screen, but this really is a new smartphone interface: not exactly intuitive, easy enough to find what you want after pecking and swiping a bit, hiding heaps of shortcuts and functionality you'll never unlock unless you read the owner's manual. And, let's be honest, you probably won't.