INTRODUCING THE RANGE

INTRODUCING THE RANGE ROVER VELAR gear lever, controlling the ventilation and driving systems. Instead, just two rotary controllers float on the piano-black finish of the lower screen. They can control anything – volume, temperature or driving settings – with the screen around them and at their centre changing accordingly. “Land Rover has been using touch screens for a long time,” says Damian Krupiński, JLR’s Infotainment Project Manager, “so it was natural to expand touch control to the climate, seats and Terrain Response. Yes, it’s an innovation, but we’re not really competing with other brands here. We’re going to be compared with smartphones and tablets. They’re all getting smarter and more intuitive. We need to move that way with our vehicles too. We have learnt how to interact with our devices, and we don’t expect our customers to learn again just because they’re in one of our vehicles.” The reasoning behind this echoes a fundamentally smarter approach to vehicle design, present in all the Velar’s details and features. As a car designed for a new market, it needs to look and feel in line with other technologies we have already come to love. “The big difference is that you look at your smartphone while you’re using it, so you don’t need physical feedback. However, when you’re driving, you will need to know that you’ve changed a setting without looking down. But we still wanted to keep the physical controls to a minimum. This is why we came up with these rotary controls which give feedback and can be utilised without looking – but which we can still configure any way we may want,” Krupiński says. “Elegant simplicity, sophistication, “FOR ME, THE BIG THEME refinement, and an unwavering belief in reductionism has been fully employed, with switches being kept to WITH THE RANGE ROVER an absolute minimum to help create a calm VELAR IS HOW TECHNOLOGY sanctuary. This puts more emphasis on getting the proportions of the interior architecture right.” ENABLES DESIGN” Novel details abound in this calm but striking GERRY MCGOVERN cabin; exclusively developed for Velar, wool trim from Danish design-textile maker Kvadrat will sit alongside the highest-grade leather on the options list. Noiseless and surprisingly cool to sit on, wool was once seen as the most luxurious material in which to trim car seats. It is still used on the rear seats of the state limousines of the British Royal family and the Japanese Imperial household. In a world-first, the Velar is bringing it back to slightly more accessible luxury cars. “Velar brings a lot of ideas which challenge traditional pre-conceptions of luxury, and this is one of them,” says Amy Frascella, Land Rover’s Chief Designer for Colour and Materials. “It was an exciting project. Yes, it needs to be a Range Rover. But as Gerry said, we could be freer in our thinking because we were going into a new segment of the market. We want to lead in car material design; we also want to offer a wider choice than just leather. Wool has properties that leather doesn’t. Some people find it more comfortable. They might choose it for a cultural or personal reason, or for the climate in which they live. And of course, some of our design-conscious buyers will already have Kvadrat in their home or office.” Aesthetics, however, includes a number of elements coming together in symphony, and looks in this regard is just one of these notes that need to be hit just right. “Of course design is about creating something beautiful, but to Less is more: from the outside, the Velar’s exquisite proportions and finely drawn lines achieve a unique balance of formality and sleek muscularity 26

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