Range Rover Evoque, dailycarblog.com
The Range Rover Evoque Is Too Expensive For What It Is
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Most of us here at DCB have, at times, owned a Land Rover. From the first generation Discovery to the second generation. Range Rover Sport, Defender, we’ve owned Land Rovers. For motoring journalists to get behind the wheel of a press loan requires what one can only refer to as “professional begging”. The standard procedure involves sucking up to the press department. We tried that and sucked, sucked so bad we got banned. Now that’s another story entirely involving a certain bullying and bigoted individual who should have been sacked for her poor conduct but hey-ho.

The individual in question is simply biding their time before they can collect their pension, protected along the way by sympathetic ignorance. This is the acceptable face of professionalism these days at that particular disgraced UK PR hell hole. Now I was forced to re-write the last sentence, you really don’t want to know what we think in private… I should not have revealed the latter. We’re banned from pretty much everywhere, what more can be done to us?

Anyway… So the next logical step in considering a Range Rover Evoque as a long-termer is to visit a Land Rover dealership under the pretense of being a prospective buyer. And you know as much as we criticise Land Rover for their shoddy attention to detail, poor build quality, abysmal reliability, poor interior fit and finish, poor in-car technology, just generally being indisciplined lousy humans or human beings, we still have to do our duty.

So we visited a Land Rover dealership recently specifically to look at the new Evoque. Nice job all round. Interior is a big step up in terms of quality, it feels premium luxury for sure, build quality is also a step up. But it’s a show car, can the end product match the display car? That is the real question. It’s true we shit on Land Rover a lot and hope they fail, but we have to admit the Evoque is a job well done.

So kudos to the people who designed and engineered the Evoque, and zero points to the PR team who have systematically misrepresented the brand they are meant to sell to the wider public. They are meant to be custodians, not low-level Max Clifford PR acolytes playing mean spirited games and defending the indefensible because we stood up for ourselves.

Range Rover Evoque is overpriced, dailycarblog.com

You see what happened, I diverted from the Evoque. We’re suffering from PTSD whenever we talk Land Rover.

Anyway…

So… we’re seriously thinking about getting an Evoque so we can test the shit out of it. And that’s where the problem started. We headed on over to the LandRover.co.uk build tool. The Evoque is stupidly overpriced, £35,000 for the D180 – 2.0L 180HP DIESEL AWD AUTOMATIC and it doesn’t even have a leather-trimmed interior. At £37k the Audi Q3 S Line TDI 40 TDI Quattro S Tronic has similar power but offers way more. Simple things like 19-inch alloys, sporting body style. Privacy glass, digital instrument binnacle, etc.

To Get the Evoque to match the Audi Q3 S Line level of equipment list we started with the base Land Rover Evoque (£31k) and added a bunch of optional extras. The Evoque bloated out a total of around £42k. But you could save yourself the time and trouble and go for the Evoque SE which offers better spec for the same price of £42k… so we totally wasted our time and your time.

Nevertheless, the Audi Q3 offers better rear passenger space and luggage space because it is slightly longer, by 11cm. A small margin but it makes a big difference. The ride and handling don’t matter so much. But admittedly all of this is first world problem territory because it only matters to people who give a fuck about such things.

The Range Rover Evoque is overpriced. But it has one advantage, it feels like small Range Rover whereas the Audi Q3 feels somewhat generic in terms of interior refinement. The Q3’s build quality is superior but if I chose to deliberately sit in a traffic jam (and I regret admitting to this) I would choose the Range Rover Evoque every time.

But I wouldn’t need to sit in a traffic jam to experience the Evoque, because at the end of the day after 1,500 miles it would develop an electric fault or engine failure. That’s Land Rover quality control for you folks.

It is hard for us to admit, but the Range Rover Evoque has gone to the top of our long-term test fleet list (funded by our generous sponsors of course). As for that particular UK PR hell hole, they can go… I am not allowed to finish the sentence, my instructions are to be fucking professional for fuck’s sake.

Range Rover Evoque, dailycarblog.com
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