Yahoo Autos 2024 Range Rover Velar First Drive Review: Off-roading in Champagne
CHAMPILLON, France – I’ve off-roaded in a fair share of places. There was Moab, Utah, and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The mighty Rubicon Trail in California, and that state’s Imperial Sand Dunes, so vast and surreal you’d swear you weren’t in the United States at all. Michigan, where I grew up and owned a few Jeep Wranglers to grind through endless winters. The gnarly Class 4 roads of Vermont (underrated), and a sprinkling of exotic locales: Iceland, Greece and the Sahara in Morocco.
But until this minute, in a 2024 Range Rover Velar, I’ve never negotiated a steep, muddy champagne vineyard in France, taking care not to crush orderly columns of pinot noir and chardonnay grapes. Not before their time, of course.
Come to think of it, with ground-zero of the world’s best bubbly visible in the hazy valley below — Epernay, the capital city of the Champagne region — this vineyard in Champillon is ideal terroir to cultivate renewed appreciation of the Velar. It’s a stretch to imagine Range Rover’s city-oriented smoothie clambering over obstacles in Utah, even if the Velar can handle far-tougher terrain than people might realize. But I can absolutely see a winery owner, whether a wealthy entrepreneur indulging a late-career wine fantasy in Napa or Tuscany, or the fourth-generation caretaker of a French chateau, touring the Back 40 of his or her estate in a dusty Velar. And then setting the nav to a fabulous three-hour dinner in town. If this is sounding like a personal fantasy, well, maybe it’s the wine. (After the drive, naturally).
The Velar stormed out of the green Midland hills of Solihull, England, for 2018, and made a solid first impression. Along with its Jaguar F-Pace platform mate, they made as pretty a pair of SUVs as the world had seen. The Velar won the World Design of the Year award in 2018. It then posted just over 17,000 sales in both 2018 and 2019, a strong showing for a new luxury nameplate sandwiched between the smaller Evoque and larger, more-established Range Rover Sport. The Velar outsold the F-Pace in both years, with Jaguar’s most-popular model (by far) finding about 13,000 and 15,000 buyers respectively.
Debonaire looks aside, both these Brits offered outstanding packaging, with more cargo space that you’d ever expect, considering their taut shapes and low-roofed bodies. The Velar’s vast 34.4 cubic-feet of stowage behind the second row is more in line with non-luxury, family-hauling compact SUVs like the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 than luxury compacts. We’d have to see how it shakes out in our real-world testing, but theoretically, it’s best-in-segment by a wide degree. Cargo space is even bigger than some midsize models, should you be comparing it more to a BMW X5 than X3 (the price tag may warrant that, too, more on that later).
For 2024, Velar gets a styling refresh, but the overall design stays true to the original's “reductive design” language that went on to be adopted by the latest flagship Range Rover and Range Rover Sport. The updates include the latest family grille and reshaped LED headlamps with streamlined running lights. At the rear, designers accentuated the Velar’s elegant overhang with a new lower bumper and LED taillamps with a 3D effect and brighter “super red” illumination. The Land Rover badge is gone, too, as Range Rover has graduated to become one of four occupants within parent JLR’s “House of Brands.” More than ever, from its floating roof to its imposing stance, the Velar simply looks like the Range Rover Jr. And that’s never a bad thing.
