Might more calm rather than more horsepower be a selling point for the luxury cars of tomorrow? Range Rover has introduced an industry-first electrostatic sound system, for its SV Ultra model, with 21 speakers, plus four bass speakers and subwoofers, complete with transducers in both seats and floor. It’s the perfect set-up for a thumping in-car rave, perhaps.
Inside the Range Rover SV Ultra
But the Gaydon, UK-based carmaker has also worked with the music department of Coventry University to develop a series of ‘wellness tracks’, complete with corresponding massage programme and each with a different vibe. Need to dial down your heart rate ahead of a tough meeting? Let your car take the strain. Need to get the blood pumping ahead of, well, a tough meeting? Your SV Ultra is at hand.
Inside the Range Rover SV Ultra
A gimmick? Perhaps. But Range Rover is thinking hard about how to make the time we spend in a car pleasing beyond the increasingly ubiquitous comfortable seating and a near-silent engine. For example, it’s also offering an upscale Airwick in the form of a collection of six fragrances baked into ceramic capsules that plug into a slot in the glove compartment and which then waft the likes of Peace, Restore and Rejuvenate – as a few of the fragrances are named – around the compartment.
The newly announced Range Rover GT
That system debuts in Range Rover’s forthcoming model – currently undergoing final testing - a grand tourer that retains the brand’s famed off-road capabilities. The Range Rover GT’s lower, sportier exterior is a distinct evolution of Range Rover’s traditional aesthetic, if not on the par of stable-mate Jaguar’s divisive Type 00 Concept of late 2024.
Range Rover GT
An all-electric power plant has allowed Range Rover to extend the GT’s wheelbase to create an especially capacious cabin, but, at 1.56 m high, the GT is also Range Rover’s lowest model to date. Frameless doors, a one-piece roof, a clamshell bonnet and muscular wheel arches over 22 inch wheels help the GT maintain Range Rover's signature stance.
Range Rover GT centre console
Although the GT is Range Rover's ‘most car-like’ product to date, as managing director Martin Limpert calls it, arguably it’s the GT’s contemporary interior that is more arresting – and calming. According to Alex Watkin, Range Rover’s chief designer for interiors, the GT represented the first example of ‘a more reductive design approach’ for the brand, with the standard in-car content – cup-holders, fridge, storage space, switchgear and so on – still available but hidden away to leave broad swathes of clutter-free surfaces.
The clutter-free interior of the GT
The traditional instrument cluster is replaced with a single screen - the HMI or Human Machine Interface, from which the fragrance capsules can also be controlled. The result is a car interior as seen through the lens of Bang & Olufsen or Dieter Rams.
The rear compartment of the Range Rover GT
Range Rover has also decided to forego the usual ‘luxury’ choice of leather in favour of using a stretch PV that allows for a seamless upholstery comprising much large panels not possible with animal skins. The company says this choice is also more sustainable, odourless, half the weight of leather and wear-tested over the equivalent of 10 years.
In another industry first, speakers and airbags are hidden behind low-gloss knitted fabric surfaces, also deployed as a single piece across the dash top. Together with the outsized panoramic glass roof the interior feeling aims at being akin to ‘an open-plan living room space,’ says Watkin.
The Range Rover GT will be the first all-electric Range Rover from Jaguar Land Rover’s new Electrified Modular Architecture platform, engineered for its battery and hybrid vehicles, with a hybrid version of the GT planned for an unspecified point in the future. It’ll follow on from the forthcoming Range Rover EV and Range Rover Sport EV.
