Range Rover Evoque 2016 Review - International

Range Rover Evoque 2.2 TDI

International Launch Review
Ascot, England

Engineering was not at the core of the Range Rover Evoque’s success. Even some of the more honest folk within Range Rover acknowledge that.

Yet engineering is at the core of the facelift, which is now on sale in Australia, with the upgrade of Britain’s big-selling style setter delivering an all-new four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine and a nine-speed automatic transmission among a raft of other steps forward.

There is a new infotainment system inside, new graphics in the instrument cluster’s digital display and even new seats. What there isn’t is a big departure from the Evoque’s unashamedly overt exterior styling.

There is a bigger intake down the bottom, some new adaptive LED headlights for the more expensive models and a choice of two grille treatments. The new cars also get twin fins on the roof to strengthen the wifi hotspot signal inside the car, there’s a thin full-width LED brake light in the spoiler and new tail-lights.

Given that Land Rovers tow a lot, and often, they’ve given the Evoque a gesture sensor on each rear corner so you can kick beneath the bumper from either side, rather than just in the centre.

It’s also useful for opening the tailgate without leaving the footpath but, like most such systems, you’ve got to do a fair bit of embarrassing and fancy Russian-style dancing to make it work before you’re fully in synch with it how it works at its best and where the sensors are.

There are four trim levels (Pure, SE, HSE and HSE Dynamic), 14 colours and 16 wheels, which indicates what’s important to the people who’ve made it the fastest-selling Land Rover of them all. Shouldn’t matter. Nobody much was complaining that the Evoque’s looks had fallen off the pace.

There are places where, far from falling off the pace, the Evoque never quite got onto it. The interior was the most obvious of those and the upgrade fixes a lot of the shortcomings, without addressing all of them.

There are new seats, with the option of a grippier sports seat. The doors have new casings, which now include a lidded storage area in the armrests, and there’s an upgrade of the 8.0-inch touch-screen multimedia unit, plus new graphics for the instrument cluster’s five-inch TFT digital screen.

But there have been corners cut inside the Evoque. Lots of them. For all its talk of building a style icon, the consistency and accuracy of the leather stitching on the dash and the seats wouldn’t pass muster at Volkswagen, much less Audi, while the plastic on the lower half of the dash is hard and doesn’t feel premium.

The glovebox is the worst of it, made from a plastic so hard that even Lego would feel compelled to upgrade it, while the lever used to open it snaps back closed like a castanet and lacks any damping whatsoever.

There are also the unchanged issues with rear-seat headroom and visibility over the shoulder when you’re changing lanes is still not great.

Another surprising area where the Evoque has been under-designed is in the sills. The German rivals tend to wrap the doors lower, with a stone and mud guard built in. The Evoque uses a traditionally wide sill, which leaves the inattentive with big mud and dirt marks on the back of their calves from getting in and out of the car. It takes a conscious effort to swing the legs wide enough to clear the sills, and it’s a surprising oversight.

Still, there’s enough leg room back there for four adults to travel most places in comfort and the new seats are terrifically supportive, with the sport seat having adjustable side bolstering.

But the biggest news is the engine. The Ford-derived 2.2-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel has been replaced by the Ingenium in-house JLR motor, which has less power but more of everything else you actually want in a diesel. More smoothness, more sophistication, more friendliness.

The 2.0-litre turbo-diesel is absolutely the right fit for a Range Rover badge of this size. It might have less power, but it never feels wanting and in return it delivers its power with effortless dignity and noise, vibration and harshness levels that aren’t matched by some petrol engines.

This is the Land Rover version of the engine that debuted in the Jaguar XE and about 20 per cent of its parts were swapped out in the changeover, mostly external bits related to making it fit the Evoque’s transverse layout.

There are obvious good points to the new engine, but some hidden ones as well. The service intervals have been pushed out from 26,000km to 34,000, meaning an average three-year owner needs to mess around for one service fewer than before.

There are no mechanical changes to the petrol engines in the family, so it continues with 177kW of power and 340Nm of torque, but there are two versions of the Ingenium turbo-diesel, with an entry-level 110kW and 380Nm version and the HSE and HSE Dynamic delivering 132kW of power and 430Nm of torque (at 1750rpm).

We tested the most powerful of the diesels (don’t blame us, we didn’t have a choice) and, strangely, found even the most outlandish of Land Rover’s sophistication claims for it to be pretty much true.

We didn’t quite go far enough to refill it, so couldn’t test the claim of a 15 per cent fall in fuel consumption to 4.8L/100km (mated to a 54-litre fuel tank), but we covered enough ground to judge it almost everywhere else.

Coupled to the nine-speed automatic, it’s a sweet package in most situations. There are moments when we found the car a little droning at a constant 70mph (it’s OK, we were in England), only to find we had locked out the tallest overdriven gear (ninth) by accidentally moving the transmission dial on the centre console into Sport. One notch counter-clockwise into Drive and it suddenly got hundreds of revs quieter.

The engine imparts a soft feel into the cabin that belies its enthusiasm for work, contributing very little to the interior noise levels and usually left in the audible wake of the wind. Not bad for a diesel.

It also gets into its work quickly from low revs, delivering useful performance from 1500rpm but still happy enough to spin out well beyond 4500rpm when you need to overtake.

And you just can’t find a way to make it sound or feel undercooked or clumsy and rough. That’s just not in the Ingenium’s repertoire.

Beneath all that, our all-wheel drive Evoque ran on the optional ($1850, thanks for asking) adaptive damping system, which runs the gamut from Comfort to Dynamic to Slippery to Off Road settings. Land Rover packages the damper behaviour settings with the throttle, skid-control, exhaust, transmission and steering settings, though you can mix and match if you want.

It sets up the Comfort and Dynamic settings closer than most, so on England’s lumpy B-roads, the first place you notice the change is in the steering. It’s a bit too over keen to self-centre in its default Comfort setting and feels a lot crisper and cleaner in Dynamic. And the damping doesn’t feel overly hard in Dynamic, like it can in so many cars.

Safe to say a lot of buyers won’t spot the difference between the two, but it’s there for the observant and Dynamic makes it feel a lot lighter than its 1800+kg suggests (and 20-inch alloys with low-profile rubber doesn’t hurt).

Either way, it is a reliable handler, rather than a sparkler, and never feels like it’s going to ask you questions that, as a driver, you can’t answer.

We also got dirty and, being England, we got dirty in the rain. On tyres compromised for on-road work, the Evoque made light work of most of the muddied woodland tracks we took it on, shrinking big bump hits without eliminating them and the off-road mud mode minimizing wheel spin on the rough stuff.

Only on one steep, clay-ridden descent did nature and physics conspire to belittle its hill descent control, and given that the same system actually found the grip to slow down and turn on the wet grass further down the hill, we put it down to a surface about as slippery as ice.

Everywhere else, it was simply unshakeable and, with the big brain doing most of the organising, it slithered and eked and trickled over everything a run through a Lord’s hunting estate (no, seriously) could throw at it.

And it remained comfortable throughout, imbuing everybody inside with that unflappable Range Rover sense that it was all going to be peachy, no matter how ugly it looked through the windscreen.

The Evoque never really relied what it did well as a car. It sold on the basis of delivering a stunning looking machine with a Range Rover badge.

The MY16 version now comes a lot closer to delivering the driving experience that ought to go with that badge and that body than it ever did before. But it’s not perfect and the value for money isn’t sensational, easily bested by the Germans in the class.

But, then, they don’t look like this. And they’re not Range Rovers.

2016 Range Rover Evoque pricing and specifications:
On sale: November
Price: $51,995-$80,605
Engine: 2.0-litre turbo-diesel four-cylinder (Td4 180)
Output: 132kW/430Nm
Transmission: Nine-speed automatic
Fuel: 4.8L/100km
CO2: 133g/km
Safety rating: TBC

What we liked:
>> Sophisticated engine behaviour
>> Still looks terrific
>> Slick gearbox work

Not so much:
>> Too many cut corners inside
>> Not awesome value for money
>> Muddy-calf syndrome