On the other hand, it is the slowest and less composed cabrio you can buy for this kind of money. Land Rover isn't in the habit of making unpopular products lately. Regardless, enough people 'would' to make this thing viable. But purely objectively, this car isn’t the dog’s dinner you might have expected. I left my house at six in the morning under cover of darkness to test the roof-down behaviour. I’m not saying it’d be better with flex, but the rumbly ride is a telltale clue the Evoque wasn’t conceived with a convertible model in mind.īut come on, you just wouldn’t would you? The bad news is that there’s a resonance, a general crashiness, about the stiffened chassis that doesn’t take kindly to uneven roads. The good news is there’s no perceptible wobbling of the rear-view mirror or windscreen pillars, and the steering column stays where it was fixed in the factory. I drove a six-speed automatic Kia Sportage last week that offered smoother step-off, kickdown and more sensible gear selection than than this Range Rover.ĭoes it flop about on your cruddy British roads? But so far as accelerating goes, this feels like an underpowered machine, and the indecisive nine-speed gearbox isn’t a helpful ally. The Evoque – any Evoque – clearly isn’t a car you brake late and turn hard in, so effects of the weight gain aren’t too, um, heavily felt there, though the brake pedal is admittedly very squidgy – a tactic to disguise the car’s mass, for sure. Claims of 0-62mph in 9.7sec and 121mph for this lump feel generous. The Ingenium diesel engine is not the most thrusting of turbodiesel powerplants, even for a 2.0-litre, and when laden with some 280kg of pillar, sill and bulkhead stiffening, not to mention the roof’s hushed mechanism, it’s swamped. So assuming you have the necessary nerve to drive around in a convertible miniature Range Rover, you’re actually getting quite a good piece of kit? Ironically, this is the most modern an Evoque interior’s ever felt, despite being five years old, and that’s entirely down to the rebooted media centre. It is a superb touchscreen – fast, responsive, intuitive and beautifully rendered. Convertibles use the InControl Touch Pro system that’s finally making inroads into the Jaguar Land Rover range. Still, the seats aren’t token tribute acts – you could reasonably put adults back there – just as comfortably as in the conventional German cabrios.Īnd what about the same old rubbish touchscreen that controls all the infotainment functions? However, the rear seats are of a usable shape and size – although that’s slightly skewed by the fact a hard-top three-door Evoque is hardly commodious. The rear view is similarly pinched, so a reversing camera is standard, not that it’s much help when you’re desperately scanning your blind-spot on a spray-soaked motorway. Any good?Īcceptably quiet for a cabrio, but the huge door mirrors generate the familiar Evoque bugbear of billowing wind noise, and twinning with gargantuan windscreen pillars, knacker junction visibility.
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