motoring
The Range Rover Hybrid An Electric Country House on Wheels
Range Rover Hybrid P400e Vogue SE PHEV Review
Ahh, the ubiquitous Range Rover, loved for decades by so many for its off-road mastery and palpable history of adventure, yet so derided for being ill-used as a town car.
I remember the eighties well, when every chap that came into some money spent their first windfall on a Range Rover with black leather interior. It was the status car for a decade celebrated for profligate spending and conspicuous wealth. Not to mention the big hair, shoulder pads and very dodgy pop music. Yes, the Range Rover has been going since the ’70s but it was the eighties that saw it move from the farm and country estate to the narrow streets of Chelsea.
However the Vogue SE P400e PHEV is no ordinary Range Rover, but a hybrid, an electric beauty of leviathan proportions, with eco-friendly credentials (85.1-74.7 mpg). Sporting an electric motor of 141 bhp to accompany the rather lovely Ingenium 2 L 4 cylinder 404 bhp engine with a torque of 640Nm. Add to this a top speed of 137 miles, plus a 20-30 mile range just on electric. Nippy too, for a car weighing 2.6 tonnes, going from 0-62 mph in just 6.8 seconds. The 4 cylinder engine is a little marvel, smooth and powerful. Jaguar use the same, and it produces peak torque right at 1,200 rpm, which is superb.
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surreymagazineonline.co.uk
PHEV stands for Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle, another acronym to add to the vastly increasing electric lexicon. So, is the Range Rover now a bonafide country hippy, loving nature and preserving our environment?
Well, yes actually, the hybrid system may only be halfway there, but it is a gateway car for those petrol heads that need gentle easing into this new technology.
If you couldn't care less about the electric side of things, you can have the 5 L V8 565 bhp supercharged petrol engine in the SVAutobiography Dynamic, that will get you from 0-62 mph in 5.4 seconds, which
starts to get interesting acceleration wise. However, the advantage of being able to glide 20 miles, without petrol, may outweigh the additional power and acceleration of the bigger V8 engine.
The Range Rover P400e takes eight hours to fully recharge from a standard power outlet or under three hours from a fast
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