Stuart Frith, the chief programme engineer for the new Range Rover Sport, has revealed details of more derivatives to come, including “over 500kg of weight reduction compared to the outgoing model” for the still-secret four-cylinder versions.
Interviewed at a special preview event within Land Rover’s Solihull headquarters, Frith says he and his team started work on the second generation vehicle four years ago. Weight loss was one of the key factors in the development of project L494, as well as agility, this being “the fastest and most agile Land Rover yet”.
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In addition to being so much lighter than generation one, the new model has been developed to be even better off-road – an essential requirement of all Land Rover models. That means almost 600mm of ground clearance in raised mode, as well as a wading depth of 850mm – the water line is as high as mid-headlights.
Production of this new vehicle is set to begin later in May, with deliveries of the first supercharged petrol variants (340PS 3.0-litre V6 and 510PS 5.0-litre V8 built by Ford at Bridgend in Wales) and two diesels (a 3.0-litre V6 with 258PS or 292PS) due to commence in the UK and elsewhere from July. A 339PS 4.4-litre V8 diesel will be added later in the year, as well as a diesel-electric hybrid. JLR’s V6 and V8 diesels are sourced from Ford’s Dagenham plant to the east of London, as will be the combustion engine part of the forthcoming diesel hybrid.
When j-a asked the inevitable next question, we were told that “yes, a plug-in hybrid is possible, from an engineering point of view”, but no official announcement of such a potential derivative has been made. Also, when pressed, JLR executives would not say whether or not a petrol-electric hybrid will be launched for the US and other markets where diesel hybrids are presently more or less unknown.
Jaguar Land Rover’s own future family of four-cylinder diesel and petrol engines had been expected to be the I4 powertrains in question for the Range Rover Sport but the petrol, at least, will be the same Si4 GTD-i direct injection turbo unit as features in the Evoque. This is a version of Ford’s 2.0 EcoBoost. JLR’s own I4 engines will follow, but no details of these units have been revealed; not even the engine family name. No-one at JLR would comment on suggestions that the name is ‘Hotfire’, nor on speculation of direct injection and turbocharging.
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By GlobalDataIn September 2011, Tata Motors announced a new engine factory for JLR. This facility, which will build four-cylinder petrol and diesel engines, is presently under construction at i54 South Staffordshire, a business park near Wolverhampton in the English Midlands.
When the first advance media information for the Range Rover Sport was issued by Land Rover earlier this year, the JLR division stated that like-for-like mass reduction is 420kg for V6 diesel variants. The average weight for a first generation Range Rover Sport is quoted as 2,535kg, as opposed to 2,135kg for the new model. The four-cylinder variants should come in at close to the two-tonne mark, a fact confirmed to j-a by Stuart Frith.
