EVO NEWS CAR REVIEWS DATA VIDEOS FEATURES BUY NEW USED CARS BUYING GUIDES TRACKDAYS COMMUNITY WIN 3 ISSUES FOR £1 SHOP REGISTER LOGIN Free Newsletter Features Range Rover Evoque analysis Richard Porter looks into the new baby Range Rover, the Evoque. With front-drive and 58mpg, it's a departure for the company By Richard Porter September 2010 Range Rover Evoque The Range Rover Evoque will make its first public appearance at the Paris motor show next week, although you won’t be able to buy one until summer next year. Every Evoque at the show will be painted white, making a deliberate link back to the original, all-white LRX concept which the production Evoque so closely resembles. In translating show car into showroom model, Land Rover’s designers and engineers have had to make some changes amounting to an extra 20mm of height on the bonnet line to aid pedestrian safety, a commensurate increase in roof height, a fractional decrease in width, and the addition of door handles. Otherwise, the Evoque is faithful to the concept that spawned it. Under the skin, the new car is based on the Freelander and will be built in the same plant at Halewood on Merseyside. However, whilst the Evoque shares its basic genes with the smallest Land Rover, the company says up to 70 percent of the underpinnings have been modified, either as a result of a desire to stay faithful to the look of the concept car or to chase a more dynamic driving experience. As a result, the track has grown by 20mm and key components including suspension knuckles and control arms are now made of aluminium, to the benefit of unsprung weight and therefore agility. Tellingly, the dynamic benchmarks for the Evoque extended beyond high riding rivals to include cars such as the BMW 1-series. This will be the first Land Rover product to use electric rather than hydraulic power steering, the first to offer magnetorheological dampers and, in a move that may trouble purists, the first to be available without four-wheel drive. The decision to sell a front-wheel-drive Evoque will allow Land Rover to boast a headline economy figure of 58mpg and CO2 emissions below 130g/km, though it’s claimed even some four-wheel-drive models will be capable of hitting 50 miles per gallon too. A standard stop/start system and extensive use of aluminium and plastic in the body that makes this car up to 150kg lighter than an equivalent Freelander also help in the quest for efficiency. The greatest economy will come from a pair of diesel models using a tweaked version of the 2.2-litre engine from the Freelander in either 148bhp or 187bhp tune. The diesels will be available with manual or auto gearboxes, both with six speeds, whilst the sole petrol engine – a 237bhp, 2-litre, turbocharged, direct injection four cylinder from Ford’s new ‘Ecoboost’ family – will come connected only to a paddle shift auto. It’s no coincidence that the countries where petrol powered Land Rovers are popular are also those that favour automatics, most notably China and the United States. There is currently no plan to offer the petrol unit with a manual ‘box, though Land Rover engineers reckon it would be easy to do, if the demand was there.