You wait four years for a new car from JLR and then two come along at once. Well, three, actually. The Jaguar Type 01, revealed earlier this month, was the first new metal out of the Gaydon gates since the L461-generation Range Rover Sport of 2022, and now we’ve had our first chance to drive this new Range Rover Electric and its Range Rover Sport Electric sibling.
We’ll be kind and call the Range Rover Electric an all-new car, because there’s a case to be made for this being a derivative, a powertrain option to simply tick on the configurator. That’s largely how Range Rover will market it and push it in front of buyers, so keen is the brand for the car to be not defined by a powertrain and the experience to be consistent whatever the propulsion method.
Whatever the buyers will be told, there's a serious engineering story to be shared in the Range Rover going electric. Little of what is underneath the vast amount of aluminium bodywork is familiar from the petrol, diesel and hybrid versions of the L460 Range Rover we’ve come to know. All the major electrical drive components, including the motors and battery, are home-grown and in-house designed and made, because nothing out there on the market could handle the breadth of ability needed for a Range Rover.
We’ve been talking about this EV for even longer than four years. So has JLR: it was a cornerstone of the company's Reimagine strategy of 2021, under which Range Rover was turned into a standalone brand in early 2023. We drove a near-production prototype more than a year ago off road and an even more finished version (not a technical term…) on a proving ground just a few weeks ago.
