[ajmat]

Originally Posted by sanojrawap

UK Pricing starts at £70,000 ($115,000)

Since UK is RHD, the cars would probably come from the UK instead of the USA, therefore I have calculated that it should cost Rs.1.35cr - Rs.1.5cr in India..

Regards,
sanojrawap.

Note the word "starts", as one adds the engine options and goodies , the price will hit 100,000 pounds. Only the V*'s are coming and fully loaded that too.

[sanojrawap]

Originally Posted by ajmat

Note the word "starts", as one adds the engine options and goodies , the price will hit 100,000 pounds. Only the V*'s are coming and fully loaded that too.

Yes, I meant those are the starting prices in the UK and USA and that the cheapest basic version should cost as much as I mentioned in my previous comment when imported into India, but I didn't know they were only bringing the V8. I still hope they manage to lower the price since Rs.1.75cr seems a bit too much when compared to the previous generation, I know it is a completely new product but I don't think it deserves a completely new price tag, it isn't a new model which is a class higher than the old one, it is just a replacement for the old Range Rover.

Regards,
sanojrawap.

[SrikantDora]

Superb review Ajmat!! One of the best in Team-BHP. When I go back & read some of the old reviews, I get surprised because the detailing & photography gets better with every review. Also not sure if any one noticed, we are getting reviews way before the vehicle launch, earlier we had to wait till the launch for an official review.

Way to go guys, this shows the mark of Team-BHP in our auto industry & it is all over the manufactures mind these days

[Thilak29]

The new Range Rover has scored the maximum number of stars at the Euro-NCAP crash tests[1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XHQNjeIi2w

[rangarx]

Mighty Impressive!

Feather on this team's cap!

Invited for international driving events. Really feeling honored!

Now I know the secret behind the Indian Auto Mags publishing the same scoops month after month.

[fz_rider]

Range Rover launched at starting price point of 1.72 crore !

[Scorcher]

The Range Rover in it’s new avatar has been launched in India at 1.72cr!

The car is available in three variants, Autobiography Supercharged V8 Petrol, Autobiography Diesel and Vogue SE (Diesel), all mated to an 8-speed auto-transmission.

Autobiography (Petrol):

• Engine – 4999cc Supercharged V8
• Output – 510ps at 6000-6500rpm
• Torque – 625nm at 2500-5500rpm

Autobiography (Diesel)/Vogue SE:

• Engine – 4367cc V8
• Output – 339ps at 3500rpm
• Torque – 700nm at 1750-3000rpm

Source

[avira_tk]

JLR could have chosen a better shade of leather for the launch atleast, also, that instrument cluster should have been programmed to display something other than a warning sign.

The Autobiography edition is a halo model for the me-first crowd, I am sure cheaper options with a lot of the options left out will be available later.

[karan561]

Great to see an immediate launch in India, thanks to Tata group

Also hope to see the practical 3.0 V6 Diesel on offer soon, will make it a bit more affordable.

[arup.misra]

Nice to see the India launch not lagging the global peers.

The red leather looks garish. A slightly sober approach for the launch would have been much better.

[Omtoatom]

I don't see many takers for either of these - the 5L Supercharged V8 petrol even more so. I think JLR may be merely testing waters right now. Quite possible that Tatas may want to send out a clear message that India continues to remain on par with the rest of the world when it comes to new launches.

Don't quite dig the overdose of red they decided to go with for the launch.

I think, more practical and affordable options will follow in due course.

[karan561]

Originally Posted by arup.misra

The red leather looks garish. A slightly sober approach for the launch would have been much better.

Originally Posted by avira_tk

JLR could have chosen a better shade of leather for the launch atleast, also, that instrument cluster should have been programmed to display something other than a warning sign.

Originally Posted by Omtoatom

Don't quite dig the overdose of red they decided to go with for the launch.

Regarding the interior shade of the launch i agree it is very to the face RED, may be this is just a customers car (i.e. already customized for the shade of RED) kept on display for the launch , something what we saw in the Audi 4.2 TDi launch car which was customized for the Bachchans;

http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian...ml#post2860700

[manishk123]

Absolutely ridiculous pricing. For that money I can get an Audi Q7, a BMW X5 and still have some change left for a daily runner like a VW Jetta. JLR seems to have confused the RR with Rolls Royce

[akj53]

This excellent review by Ajmat deserves some more information about JLR, The company and its iconic vehicles.

This has been published today in The Telegraph U.K. To view the full article with photographs, please follow the link provided at the bottom.

Range Rover's return

For the first time in its 50-year history, assembly lines at the once-troubled Halewood plant are rolling round the clock, to satisfy demand for the Range Rover Evoque

In April this year Victoria Beckham went to Beijing to launch her limited-edition version of the Range Rover Evoque. It was the eve of the Auto China motor show, and the country’s, and therefore potentially the world’s, leading dealers were assembled for the occasion.

The edition of 200 cars is priced at £80,000, nearly three times as much as the basic model. The radiator grille and dashboard have genuine rose-gold accents; the carpet is thick mohair, reminding her of the carpet in the Rolls-Royce that her father owned when she was a child.

Beckham, who was bare-shouldered in a cream-and-brown bandage dress and sporting extremely high-heeled peep-toe boots, said she always drove Range Rovers and had 'designed’ (or at least pimped) 'a car I want to drive and David also wants to drive’. In an interview that week she said she had looked at her matt-black crocodile structured handbag, then at the Evoque and thought, 'The car looks like a bag on wheels. It’s very me. It’s very, very me.’

Six months later, on a Saturday afternoon in a field in Cambridgeshire, a very different crowd assembled for an auction of vintage tractors, motorbikes and bits and pieces of machinery. No one here was wearing a bandage dress or high-heeled boots. Hardly anyone was even country-smart. It was an assembly of weather-beaten faces and weather-beaten clothes, although discreetly tucked into the crowd were a few men in expensive trousers with very deep pockets, because this was no ordinary country sale.

In place of honour, standing alone in its own little enclosure, was what must be the world’s most distinguished Land Rover, presented by the Rover company to Sir Winston Churchill for his 80th birthday, on November 30 1954. In it the former prime minister, who had survived a major stroke the previous year, would be driven around his Chartwell estate. Corroded, battered and unrestored, its only concession to greatness was an extra-wide seat for the extra-wide passenger. Later a roof was added to the cab and a footwell heater installed for him.

There were bidders in the tent as well as others (including the Land Rover company) on telephones and iPads. Bidding started at £40,000 and rose swiftly in £5,000 leaps. Eventually the Land Rover sold for £129,000 to a man in the crowd who chose to remain anonymous.

It’s a long road from the original Land Rover to the Range Rover Evoque, but then six decades is a long time in motoring, and a long time in the history of celebrity. In 1954 Sir Winston Churchill was by far the most famous Briton; now no one is as world famous as the Beckhams. It is a different world: few were more witheringly opposed to Indian independence than Churchill. He would have been startled to learn that it is Indian owners who preside over the unprecedented success that the company is enjoying now. Annual production of Land Rovers and Range Rovers is three times what it was in 1992, and last year Jaguar Land Rover, the company that the Tata Group of Mumbai bought from Ford in 2008, made a pre-tax profit of £1.5 billion and is embarking on probably the biggest investment programme the British car industry has ever seen.

In the past two years the company has increased its British labour force by 8,000 and in August it announced that its Halewood factory on Merseyside was going on to 24-hour working for the first time in its 50-year history. But that is just the start. This month information inadvertently leaked by one of the firm’s British directors revealed the extraordinary scope of the company’s ambitions: by 2020 it plans to launch 16 new variations on its range of models and to double its annual output to 600,000.

Although neither Sir Winston Churchill nor Victoria Beckham is perhaps the typical customer, they are symbols of the company’s potent chemistry: Land Rover, the pioneering British any-terrain vehicle conceived in 1947, the bulldog that has yomped across these islands’ fields and forests ever since as well as tackling foreign climes, sometimes under fire, is designed only to serve. Range Rover, which the company introduced in 1970, was still a utility vehicle, but in the years since it has been refined and accessorised into a luxury symbol, a car associated as much with Harvey Nichols as with harvesting. The status of the Range Rover, as well as its size, declares itself to owners and other road-users alike: one man who writes car reports and drives everything from Fords to Ferraris says that in his experience on city streets only a Bentley attracts more aggression and abuse than a Range Rover.

The days when SUVs (4x4s) were bought only by those whose lives took them off-road a lot of the time are long gone – only 10 per cent of Range Rover owners fall into that category. SUVs across the spectrum from the Porsche Cayenne to the cheap little Dacia Duster have become today’s vehicles of choice. At the top of the market, where cars such as the BMW 7 series sit, there has been a swing towards SUVs. Range Rover was in at the start of this and has become a must-have among many of the fashion-conscious super-rich from Los Angeles to China as well as a staple for down-to-earth adherents who would never drive anything else.

But the Evoque is a phenomenon in its own right. Developed from a concept car – the LRX – first shown at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in 2008, it looks, apart from the radiator grille and the lights, quite unlike a Range Rover: whizzy not boxy, smaller yet more aggressive-looking. Many people say the back of the roof on the three-door version looks squashed, as if something has dropped on it, others say 'wow’. That is because it is what is called a 'white-space’ car, meaning that it is not an update on an existing model but a whole new thing. It is what companies dream about because it brings with it a whole new market. Of those buying Evoques, 85 per cent have not owned an SUV before. And as a large car but small Range Rover with a conspicuous sense of style it has been a winner with women – 70 per cent of new owners are female.

Some insiders thought that at best Range Rover had an interesting small-scale production on their hands with the Evoque, 30,000 a year perhaps, but it soon became clear that there was demand for maybe 70,000 a year. The company now produces 100,000 Evoques annually with demand far outstripping supply. The waiting list can be as long as six months. The Chinese market is hungry, and the car is selling in the United States and many dozens of other countries as well as at home; four out of five Evoques coming off the production line now are left-hand drive.

Gerry McGovern is the director of design for Land Rover. The winner of many awards, he is clearly a master of his craft and he does not suffer from false modesty, self-effacement or settling for second-best. He is in his mid-50s, a Coventry-born apostle of what he calls 'premiumness’. When we meet in his office at the Jaguar Land Rover design and engineering headquarters at Gaydon in Warwickshire, he is wearing a brown suit and blue shirt with white collar and cuffs and rather conspicuous cuff-links. He begins with an interesting account of how he directed his Savile Row tailor to cut his waistcoat a little differently and how the tailor liked it so much that he has copied it… 'But that’s enough about the tailoring, although it’s all relevant. It’s a world of luxury,’ McGovern says.

'We’re actually sending our middle managers to learn about luxury. We’ll take them to Claridge’s and get the manager to talk to them about the luxury customer. We’ll take them to Savile Row to Henry Poole’s and the MD there will talk to them about the luxury customer. They’ll go to certain restaurants and consider luxury in all its manifestations because they need to understand that luxury isn’t just nice to have. It’s actually a given for what we’re doing in this sector of the market.’

Why do people who drive only on city streets and motorways pay extra for vehicles that can cope with challenging terrain? Others I spoke to at Land Rover talked of the ability to deal with all weathers, saying, 'We do have more extreme weather nowadays,’ which may be true but is not quite enough. McGovern puts it rather differently: 'In the luxury market you want capabilities you won’t use. You buy a Rolex Submariner. Why? So you can dive to 200 metres because that’s what you do every morning before you go to work?

'When we’re selling Range Rover the people buying them are high-net-worth consumers from all over the world. They may own four or five other vehicles. Ask them if they could keep only one of them which one would they keep and they all say, “Range Rover, because I could use it for a lot of things”.’

McGovern is an outstanding motor man, obviously concerned with such matters as sustainability and ergonomics. But then there is the x-factor: 'What we make must resonate on an emotional level… that’s the design, the gateway to customer desirability,’ he says.

One might think that a key component of a car’s desirability is reliability but, remarkably, for Land Rover customers the two are not conjoined. These vehicles may be tops in their capability but they come bottom in reliability – they almost always do badly in comparative tests and have come last in the What Car? annual survey 11 years running. One billionaire who bought two top-of-the-range Range Rover Autobiographys (with a six-figure price tag) found they were in dock so often during the first few months that he ended up selling one back. A quip that has currency among the outward-bound says, 'If you want to go into the bush, take a Land Rover; if you want to come out take a Toyota.’ This is the only issue that causes tentativeness in the upbeat company story. 'Yes,’ the marketing director, Finbar McFall, says. 'It has been an issue for us but we are improving. Our newest models – the Evoque, Freelander and the new Range Rover coming out now – are the best ones we’ve launched.’

People have described the Evoque as a head-turner, and certainly it is still new enough and rare enough and strange enough not to go unremarked. A passing glance may not tell you that it’s a Range Rover. But is that extending the brand or undermining it? McGovern says, 'If you can stretch the brand, it makes a massive difference to the bottom line.’ But he also uses the term that crops up regularly in the company lingua franca: 'our DNA’, meaning the essential Land Roverness, the four-wheel technology and engineering that allows them to do what Land Rovers do.

Another thing on which all are agreed is the company’s good fortune in having Tata as its owner. Well, you may say, they would they say that, wouldn’t they? But it has the ring of truth. Tata is a conglomerate with all sorts of businesses on various continents ranging from Tata Motors in India to the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan (the flagship of its Taj hotel chain) to mining in Africa to Corus steel in Europe to Tetley tea. When Ford needed to sell Jaguar Land Rover in 2008 some doubted if Tata had what it takes. It bought the company at a knockdown price – £1.15 billion – but it was immediately put to the severest test by the precipitous collapse of the car market that year. Showing nerve for the fray and with the help of the unions, they pulled through. From the start Tata was willing to invest and plan long-term. Under Ford, the previous saviour of a firm that has had many crises, Jaguar Land Rover was one division among many in a highly bureaucratic US company. Tata offered it autonomy. It brought in a new CEO then said, 'You’re the guys who know the business, you run it.’

In Ratan Tata, the 75-year-old and soon-to-retire head of the Indian conglomerate, the company has a man with a magnificent track record of success, whose modesty, personal charm and integrity impress all who meet him. He is also a man who loves cars and has a mind-blowing collection of his own, which he cares for meticulously and likes to drive very fast. Apart from potential profits he saw there were strategic reasons for buying Land Rover: 'First, as Tata motors is the number two SUV builder in India, owning the gold standard of SUVs would be an enormous benefit to us. Second, to own a luxury brand with an immense history and heritage such as Jaguar is a virtually irresistible opportunity,’ Tata says. But there was another, more personal reason for his enthusiasm. His father, Naval, was one of five people in India who took delivery of a Jaguar XK120 in the late 1940s. 'I remember the XK with great nostalgia,’ Tata says. 'I particularly remember the instruments on the dashboard and how stylish they looked.’

When the Halewood plant on Merseyside, which makes the Evoque and the Freelander, switched to 24-hour working in August, in order to keep up with demand, 1,000 new jobs were created, attracting 30,000 applicants. At a time of economic recession, this was startling news; perhaps most startling to those with a memory for industrial history was that this former Ford plant, with its blood-curdling history of industrial disruption, which has several times come near to closure, had become a success story, producing 460 Evoques a day and 230 Freelanders, the two products setting new company standards for reliability. 'I’m not taking anything away from the Ford Escort,’ Kenny Smith, Halewood’s Unite union convener, says. 'It gave us a good living for a long time, but there’s a bit of pride in building premier cars that sell for £40,000 or £50,000. There’s more focus on, “Make sure this is right, we can’t make a mistake.”’

Smith has worked here for 38 years and well remembers the days when the whole workforce regularly walked out for almost no reason whatsoever. Last month, when a pay offer of a 9.8 per cent increase over two years was put to, and accepted by, a mass meeting, he looked round and realised there were very few left who had ever been on strike. 'There are a lot of young people here,’ he says. 'They’re in well-paid jobs, certainly well-paid for Merseyside. If anything happened to this plant it would be catastrophic.’

The long, tortuous economic and industrial history of the area and the plant have taught Kenny Smith that even in good times one should keep an eye out for the bad, but it looks now as if four decades at Halewood will lead to sunlit uplands. The company will be expanding production in India and China, but Halewood seems certain to benefit in investment and jobs. A soft-top Evoque is in the plans, as well as a baby Freelander and, the design director, Gerry McGovern hopes, a smaller version of the Evoque as well.

Out on the line cars are passing along at the rate of one every 82 seconds. It is very different from the mass-production of old. The men (and the few women) refer to detailed spec sheets for each vehicle, listing multiple variations – they are going to so many different countries, and there is a long menu of options about trim and extras. There is a strong sense of a work force that prides itself on doing things right.

When the motoring press gathered last year for the launch of the Evoque they dined in the nave of Liverpool Cathedral. In his speech to them the Dean said, 'You are eating here because this car is so important to Liverpool.’ For Merseyside it has been a blessing.'

For Halewood and a swath of British industry it may be the start of something more like a miracle.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/...rs-return.html



Recently I was driven by a friend of mine in London, first in his Bentley Arnage and later in his Range Rover. Both vehicles were built like ultra luxurious tanks and offered outstanding comfort and luxury. But the Range Rover's commanding front seat gave the feeling like sitting in an emperor's throne like TAKHTE TAOUS which no other vehicle can match.

My friend uses his RR for his daily use while Bentley is used for formal occasions.

[karan561]

Video Review of the 2013 Range Rover by Shapur Kotwal, ACI;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrr-r...2&feature=plcp