10:56 am, March 2, 2017
RANGE ROVER has unveiled its next luxury SUV Velar, predicted to be a huge seller with 12,000 enquiries made in the first six days.
The fourth member of the Range Rover family will be its second smallest, sitting between the Evoque and Sport models in the luxury carmaker’s line-up. The mid-sized SUV will be available with six powertrains ranging from the 178bhp 2.0-litre Ingenium diesel to the potent 375bhp supercharged 3.0-litre V6 petrol.
The British manufacturer describes the Velar, which will cost from £44,830, as ‘filling the white space’ that it sees between the two. This is certainly true pricewise – the Evoque costs from £30,600, while the Sport is priced from £59,700.
Here’s a better look at the Range Rover Velar. Looks goooood.#RangeRoverVelar #RangeRove… https://t.co/mYOgcnbg7u pic.twitter.com/5GRXFLBFfH
— Darren Cassey (@DCassey) March 1, 2017
Land Rover is expecting this next model to be as big a hit as those currently in the range, giving its retail network a lot to be excited about.
Speaking with Car Dealer, UK managing director of Jaguar Land Rover Jeremy Hicks said: ‘Now you’ve got Evoque which starts at £30,000 and goes up to £50,000 and the Sport which starts at £60,000 and goes up to £100,000 with SVR – there’s clearly a space between those.
‘And we could see Evoque being compared against bigger, more expensive cars, and it was clear there was a space in our lineup for something else so it became almost a no brainer.’
He added: ‘We’ve become very good at identifying ‘white space’ in the market – in 2009 we sold under 200,000 cars, we’re at 600,000 now so the business is growing and we still have ambition to keep going. So we can’t comment on expanding the model range, but there is always space to grow.
‘After we released the teaser and the name six days ago, we’ve had 12,000 people have gone online and given us their details to say ‘keep me informed’. Compare that to Evoque, and we had 3,000 names down in the same period.’
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