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Road tests nearly always put Land / Range Rovers at the top of the class when it comes to off-road work. I believe the unreliability comes usually from poor assembly and faulty components, often electronic, and not from the suspension or 4wd bits.
It's a pity because LR could once again be something for GB to be proud of: there's nothing wrong with British workmanship as such, as Honda, Nissan and Toyota would testify. But they need to be well managed and to work with good quality components in the first place.
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But the fact that in the cases of Honda, Toyota and Nissan specifically the British are only trusted to put it together like flatpack furniture and not actually make, build or design it tells its own story.
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Some design work for Japanese manufacturers is done here. Nissan, for example, have a design centre near Paddington Station. Googling it revealed the following:
"Nissan established the studio in 2005 to gather what it says are unique influences from the UK’s thriving capital. The Rotunda, which employs 60 people, 15 of them full-time designers, plays a vital part in Nissan’s global design efforts. Over the past five years its staff has produced both futuristic concept cars and designs intended for big-scale production, including the current Qashqai and Juke models."
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So the Qashqai and the Juke were our fault? you're not helping matters mate. Makes you wonder how awful the concept cars were if they're the ones which got made.
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An indifferent design well executed beats a good design badly executed every time.
The early indications of the Evoque are not promising. In spite of it's diminutive size, it's kerb weight is still about 3500lb. The Panda Cross has a kerb weight of 2200lb. That's a chasm of difference. The panda Cross at £13,000 is less than half the starting price of the Evoque's £28,000-and that only gets you FWD. A car that manages to be heavy despite being small is badly designed.
The Panda has great visibility with generously sized windows. The Evoque looks like a pillbox with a high beltline and letterbox rear windows. Visibility will be dire. This sort of styling didn't do Chrysler any favours with the 300-and I don't think it will help LR either.
I don't see the styling ageing well, and I fear that once the excitement over the launch dies down, it'll be a slow seller and will depreciate heavily.
The Panda has a classless, genderless, yet characteristic style that has wide appeal. The same cannot be said for the Evoque. Heck, I'm not a fan of 4x4s but I want a Panda Cross!
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Out of curiosity I started comparing dimensions of the Evoque with the original 1970 3 door Range Rover:
1970 Range Rover 2011 Evoque
Kerb weight: 3800lb 3500-3670lb
Length: 176" 172"
Width: 70" 77"
Height: 70" 64"
Wheelbase: 100" 105"
What stands out is that the 'baby' Evoque is in many respects bigger than the original Rangie. We can also why the Evoque looks so squat with the height being considerably less tha the width. Now I think the '70 Rangie is a design classic that has aged well. Wouldn't it have been nice if they had taken the (slightly modernised) body styling of the original and dropped it on a modern car-based body shell? Get the weight down to ~3000lb. Bingo. 70" width would make urban parking much easier too...
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No doubt will see plenty of these soon parked in the disabled bays of supermakets/shopping parks.
As attractive as a Hummer.
Edited by brum on 10/07/2011 at 01:50
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In general though cars are bigger than 30-40 years ago. Even bigger than less than 20 years ago. I remember when a Fiesta was a small car, now its a viable 5 door vehicle which four people can sit in, its a Focus which has been through a hot wash and shrunk a little. The Ka is now Ford's "small" car. The new Mondeo is bigger all round than Ford's executive car the Scorpio of the 90s. i'd be interested to see a study in the average vehicle size and how its increased, and more interested as to why we still use the dimensions of the old Ford anglia to paint parking spaces when clearly its too small.
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True-but can you imagine ford's Ka being bigger than the the old Granada?
This is being touted as a whole new breed of downsized SUV-and it isn't.
The small parking bay spaces is resolved by the fact the area of a carpak is finite. Make the spaces bigger and you have fewer of them. Where do the other cars go?
Edited by unthrottled on 10/07/2011 at 02:22
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Build a bigger car park. Stop paving over roads with "shared space" schemes where the area wasnt built to handle the traffic which will be diverted into unsuspecting poorly equipped roads, things like that.
Edited by jamie745 on 10/07/2011 at 02:38
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But in urban areas there often isn't additional space for a carpark. Where would you extend the Grovesnor NCP carpark in Chester for instance. knock down the Roman wall adjacent to it? In Europe, there is a finite upper limit on the practical width of a car-and it has been reached!
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Well ive never been to Chester but i would recommend a multi storey. A multi storey (was 5 levels) was demolished about five years ago not far from me due to fears of it being unstable but they've said they probably wont build another one so cars just park on the site of where it used to be. Now i dont have a maths degree but i can tell you for sure thats less spaces than before.
The fact there isnt extra space is due to our lack of vision down the years and lack of anticipation of the traffic levels we'd have by the the 00s. Theres around 15 million more vehicles on Britains' roads now than there was in 1995 which im sure ive mentioned before, yet in that time we havent done much in the way of adaption to handle it so instead we've had roads which date back to the Romans just getting fuller and fuller.
America is a nation which from day one designed their country around the motor car. Houses were built with driveways before it was common place to own cars (as opposed to the streets which are virtually one lane due to parked cars on each side you see frequently in Britain, belonging to homes which just werent built to house people who could afford a car all them years ago), it was built around the idealogy of the motor car, but over here we just never got it, never saw it. Its like the 15 million extra vehicles in almost as many years took us by surprise when we shouldve seen it coming and started planning for it back in the 50s/60s. But instead we've now got this mess. A mess which has gotten to such a point where virtually every town, city and road needs demolishing and starting over all again.
And that will happen one day, probably not in my lifetime but somebody in the future is going to have to bite the bullet and "reboot" Britain as it were. They're doing their best to do it by taxing people off the road in the meantime but traffic volumes just keep on rising, so that wont work.
Edited by jamie745 on 10/07/2011 at 02:46
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If it's wearing a Range Rover badge and pricetag, it needs to be reliable above all else - the Australians have an expression "If you want to go into the outback get a Land-Rover - but if you want to get back alive get a Toyota"
Unreliability is the first characteristic that people associate with Land-Rover and Range Rover - surely they should be putting that to rights before building questionable cars for WAGS?
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I think we need not worry too much about the Evoque requiring extended car parks. Alderley Edge already has bigger parking spaces and I'm sure there's areas of Surrey with the same!
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And that will happen one day, probably not in my lifetime but somebody in the future is going to have to bite the bullet and "reboot" Britain as it were. They're doing their best to do it by taxing people off the road in the meantime but traffic volumes just keep on rising, so that wont work.
America is nowhere near as crowded as this country - there is no easy way to stop congestion, and no way that Britain will be rebuilt just to allow millions of metal boxes to have enough space. I can't see that an infrastructure incorporating thousands of years of history is going to be wiped out. It's our legacy, and something that America doesn't have. But I suppose you would like the whole country to look like Harlow or Milton Keynes.
And the slow but inexorable increase in human population ain't going away for a while.
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Evoqute on Top Gear tonight in its natural habitat chauffering a megastar across Las Vegas. Also being driven through an alien environment.........................Death Valley.
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So we can expect the usual jingoistic nonsense about plucky British engineers pulling a rabbit out of the hat and bravely going where the BMW X1 and Audi Q1 have gone before?
Think I'll give it a miss.
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So we can expect the usual jingoistic nonsense about plucky British engineers pulling a rabbit out of the hat and bravely going where the BMW X1 and Audi Q1 have gone before?
Think I'll give it a miss.
God you do take things very seriously you dont you! No doubt it'll be a laugh tonight with the Evoque and i bet Jezza will actually like it as he does like modern Range Rovers (and indeed old ones) but calling it jingoistic nonsense suggests you take it far too seriously mate. Chill out.
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Just because you cant see it doesnt mean it wont happen. In the 50s people couldnt see the mobile phone coming. And legacy counts for very little when people are stuck in jams and losing money, if we have to knock down some useless grotesque wrecked buildings which are "listed" (ie in the way) to make the country better than so be it. My point was it should never of reached this point, like about how you can go down small residential roads and theres cars parked both sides like a car park, because when those houses were built they werent built with parking because only poor people lived in them, they never looked ahead and thought in the future residents there might own cars, and they shouldve been thinking about that. Too many of our roads are out of date, you can dress it up as legacy all you like they're out of date and go back to the Romans and need starting again. As i said dont see it happening in my lifetime or quickly but eventually it will have to be done and the future is always unpredictable. There were people who were born around the time of the Wright brothers who's children went on to stand on the moon, who wouldve seen that coming?
And ive never been to Harlow but Milton Keynes isnt the worst place ive ever been to.
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And legacy counts for very little when people are stuck in jams and losing money,
Well, it's a policy that most European countries have been using for over 100 years. Traffic jams are not a new phenomenon.
Youre making the classic mistake of confusing technical innovation with social change. Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it is desirable. The mobile phone was compatible with existing architecture so it was embraced. The legacy of the moon landings is very modest-they didn't change much. The innovations which have the most impact are the ones that are are compatible or enhance what is already there. I'm using a wifi internet connection while sitting in a Victorian house for instance.
We let planners go mad in the 60s and 70s withtheir utopian ideals and they build squalid, impractical, ugly rubbish that has been a headache ever since. If they'd refurbed the Victorian stock, it would still be soldering on.
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I think if something which is possible is good enough then eventually people will come round to it. The good stuff always takes some getting used to. People always hate the idea of change but they get used to it eventually. There was 20 years of propaganda against the idea of making it law to wear seatbelts for goodness sake because people dont like change, yet it happened anyway, just because someone says "err no" to your idea initially is not a reason to abandon it.
Edited by jamie745 on 10/07/2011 at 18:56
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There are plenty of reasons to abandon concrete jungles and warrens of urban expressways.UScities are sprawling, souless warrens. There is a heavy price to pay for designing everything around cars.
Seatbelts were compatible with existing car architecture and driving habits in a way that moving the steering wheel over to the left, for instance, isn't.
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Im not saying seatbelts were a bad idea, im just using it as an example as to how people dont like change and always protest against it no matter how good/bad/indifferent the idea might be.
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This is all way off topic.
The point is that wearing seatbelts is simply a change of habit. Even the cost of retrofitting seatbelts was small. You're talking about knocking town centres down and starting again. Entirely different.
Historically, most successful technologies were capatible with or enhanced existing infrastructure.
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But that existing inferstructure mustve been invented by someone it didn't just magically appear. All I'm saying is things have happened which have been so incredible that 50 years beforehand nobody wouldve believed it possible. We use technology now which was science fiction in the 70s so just when people say 'I can't see that happening' doesn't mean it won't happen. Lots of stuff happened that nobody saw happening.
The great unknown was my point, nothing more or less
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But that existing inferstructure mustve been invented by someone it didn't just magically appear. All I'm saying is things have happened which have been so incredible that 50 years beforehand nobody wouldve believed it possible. We use technology now which was science fiction in the 70s so just when people say 'I can't see that happening' doesn't mean it won't happen. Lots of stuff happened that nobody saw happening. The great unknown was my point, nothing more or less
I'm all for change but when it's good, but you're talking about knocking down masterpieces that have stood for hundreds of years. Do you think all that 60's concrete was a change for the better? It's already crumbling to pieces man, or it's been bulldosed. Ugly, with no character, and it breeds contempt for the people who have to live in it. Now if you were to have modern buildings with attractive looking materials, incorporating geothermal heating and spacious living areas, I might see that as change for the better. But so far I've been disappointed by the same old c**p built by people who are only in it for the short term, and have no vision for the future.
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Im not saying knock down Big Ben or Buckingham Palace for goodness sake but going around most english towns it is just a mish mash of old stuff, new stuff and stuff inbetween all in a hideous unworkable blend which does nothing but make everybodies life more difficult. All different segments of every town come from different times and ages when different things were being sought after in the building of it, and it just all needs doing again.
But anyway, enough of that, just caught the Top Gear Evoque (i do love Sky+) bit and i have to say i quite like the car now. I wouldnt buy one (£43k the one James had!) but if i won one i'd be thrilled, over the moon. And it wasnt totally useless off of the tarmac and i did like the interior.
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The first love was the Peugeot, then the Jag, now the Revoke...
...the ladies don't like a fickle man, Jamie!
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I said i wouldnt buy one! But if i won one i'd be delighted with it. Im perfectly happy with the Jag unthrottled and i do intend to do a first impressions review if anybody is interested when i get round to it.
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and i do intend to do a first impressions review if anybody is interested when i get round to it.
I would be...for starters
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Yes Jamie....get your bum in gear and sort it! I know you've been bezzing all over Suffolk in it ;-P
Also....for goodness' sake I leave you alone for one day and you go so far off topic....!
Edited by Bobbin Threadbare on 11/07/2011 at 21:19
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